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HOW TO SEE A PLAY 



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TtHE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO 
DALLAS • ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO 

MACMILLAN & CO., Limited 

LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA 
MELBOLTRNE 

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. 

TORONTO 



HOW 
TO SEE A PLAY 



BY 

RICHARD BURTON 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
1914 






COPVBIGHT, 1914 

By the MACMILLAN COMPANY 
Set up and Electrotyped. Published November, T914 



NOV !2!9I4 

'aA387492 



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Now here are twenty criticks .... and yet every one 
is a critick after his own way; that is, such a play is best 
because I like it. A very familiar argument, methinks, 
to prove the excellence of a play, and to which an author 
would be very unwilling to appeal for his success. 

— From Farquhar's A Discourse Upon Comedy. 



PREFACE 

r I iHIS book is aimed squarely at the theater- 
•*■ goer. It hopes to offer a concise general 
treatment upon the use of the theater, so that 
the person in the seat may get the most for his 
money; may choose his entertainment wisely, 
avoid that which is not worth while, and ap- 
preciate the values artistic and intellectual of 
what he is seeing and hearing. 

This purpose should be borne in mind, in 
reading the book, for while I trust the critic 
and the playwright may find the discussion not 
without interest and sane in principle, the de- 
sire is primarily to put into the hands of the 
many who attend the playhouse a manual that 
will prove helpful and, so far as it goes, be an 
influence toward creating in this country that 
body of alert theater auditors without which 
good drama will not flourish. The obligation 
of the theater-goer to insist on sound plays is 

vii 



PREFACE 

one too long overlooked; and just in so far as 
he does insist in ever-growing numbers upon 
drama that has technical skill, literary quality 
and interpretive insight into life, will that bet- 
ter theater come which must be the hope of all 
who realize the great social and educative 
powers of the playhouse. The words of that 
veteran actor-manager and playwright of the 
past, CoUey Gibber, are apposite here: "It 
is not to the actor therefore, but to the vitiated 
and low taste of the spectator, that the cor- 
ruptions of the stage (of what kind soever) 
have been owing. If the publick, by whom 
they must live, had spirit enough to discoun- 
tenance and declare against all the trash and 
fopperies they have been so frequently fond 
of, both the actors and the authors, to the best 
of their power, must naturally have served their 
daily table with sound and wholesome diet." 
And again he remarks : "For as their hearers 
are, so will actors be; worse or better, as the 
false or true taste applauds or discommends 
them. Hence only can our theaters improve, 
or must degenerate." Not for a moment is 



PREFACE 

it implied that this book, or any book of the 
kind, can make playwrights. Playwrights as 
well as actors are born, not made — at least, in 
the sense that seeing life dramatically and hav- 
ing a feeling for situation and climax is a gift 
and nothing else. The wise Gibber may be 
heard also upon this. "To excel in either art," 
he declares, "is a self -born happiness, which 
something more than good sense must be 
mother of." But this may be granted, while it 
is maintained stoutly that there remains to the 
dramatist a technic to be acquired, and that 
practice therein and reflection upon it makes 
perfect. The would-be playwright can learn 
his trade, even as another, and must, to suc- 
ceed. And the spectator (our main point of 
attack, as was said), the necessary coadjutor 
with player and playwright in theater success, 
can also become an adept in his part of this co- 
operative result. This book is written to assist 
him in such cooperation. 



IX 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

CHAPTER I 

THE PLAY, A FORM OF STORY TELLING 

rriHE play is a form of story telling, among 
^ several such forms: the short story, or 
tale; the novel; and in verse, the epic and that 
abbreviated version of it called the ballad. All 
of them, each in its own fashion, is trying to 
do pretty much the same thing, to tell a story. 
And by story, as the word is used in this book, 
it will be well to say that I mean such a ma- 
nipulation of human happenings as to give a 
sense of unity and growth to a definite end. 
A story implies a connection of characters and 
events so as to suggest a rounding out and 
completion, which, looked back upon, shall sat- 
isfy man's desire to discover some meaning 
and significance in what is called Life. A 

1 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

child begging at the mother's knee for "the 
end of the story," before bedtime, really repre- 
sents the race; the instinct behind the request 
is a sound one. A story, then, has a begin- 
ning, middle and end, and in the right hands 
is seen to have proportion, organic cohesion 
and development. Its parts dovetail, and what 
at first appeared to lack direction and connec- 
tive significance finally is seen to possess that 
wholeness which makes it a work of art. A 
story, therefore, is not a chance medley of in- 
cidents and characters; but an artistic texture 
so woven as to quicken our feeling that a uni- 
verse which often seems disordered and chance- 
wise is in reality ordered and pre-arranged. 
Art in its story-making does this service for 
life, even if life does not do it for us. And 
herein lies one of the differences between art 
and life ; art, as it were, going life one better 
in this rearrangement of material. 

Of the various ways referred to of telling a 
story, the play has its distinctive method 
and characteristics, to separate it from the 
others. The story is told on a stage, through 



PLAY, A FORM OF STORY TELLING 

the impersonation of character by human be- 
ings; in word and action, assisted by scenery, 
the story is unfolded. The drama (a term 
used doubly to mean plays in general or some 
particular play) is distinguished from the 
other forms mentioned in substituting dialogue 
and direct visualized action for the indirect 
narration of fiction. 

A play when printed differs also in certain 
ways ; the persons of the play are named apart 
from the text; the speakers are indicated by 
writing their names before the speeches; the 
action is indicated in parentheses, the name 
business being given to this supplementary in- 
formation, the same term that is used on the 
stage for all that lies outside dialogue and 
scenery. And the whole play, as a rule, is sub- 
divided into acts and often, especially in earlier 
drama, into scenes, lesser divisions within the 
acts; these divisions being used for purposes 
of better handling of the plot and exigencies 
of scene shifting, as well as for agreeable 
breathing spaces for the audience. The word 
scene, it may be added here, is used in English- 

3 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

speaking lands to indicate a change of scene, 
whereas in foreign drama it merely refers to 
the exit or entrance of a character, so that a 
different number of persons is on the stage. 
But there are, of course, deeper, more or- 
ganic qualities than these external attributes 
of a play. The stern limits of time in the rep- 
resentation of the stage story — little more than 
two hours, "the two hours traffic of the stage" 
mentioned by Shakespeare — necessitates tell- 
ing the story with emphasis upon its sahent 
points; only the high lights of character and 
event can be advantageously shown within such 
limits. Hence the dramatic story, as the ad- 
jective has come to show, indicates a story pre- 
senting in a terse and telling fashion only the 
most important and exciting things. To be 
dramatic is thus to be striking, to produce ef- 
fects by omission, compression, stress and cres- 
cendo. To be sure, recent modern plays can 
be named in plenty which seem to violate this 
principle; but they do so at their peril, and in 
the history of drama nothing is plainer than 
that the essence of good play-making lies in 

4, 



PLAY, A FORM OF STORY TELLING 

the power to seize the significant moments of 
the stage story and so present them as to grip 
the interest and hold it with increasing tension 
up to a culminating moment called the climax. 
Certain advantages and certain limitations 
follow from these characteristics of a play. 
For one thing, the drama is able to focus on 
the really interesting, exciting, enthralling mo- 
ments of human doings, where a novel, for ex- 
ample, which has so much more leisure to ac- 
complish its purpose to give a picture of life, 
can afford to take its time and becomes slower, 
and often, as a result, comparatively prolix and 
indirect. This may not be advisable in a piece 
of fiction, but it is often found, and master- 
pieces both of the past and present illustrate 
the possibihty; the work of a Richardson, a 
Henry James, a Bennett. But for a play this 
would be simply suicide; for the drama must 
be more direct, condensed and rapid. And just 
in proportion as a novel adopts the method of 
the play do we call it dramatic and does it win 
a general audience; the story of a Stevenson 
or a Kipling. 

5 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

Again, having in mind the advantages of 
the play, the stage story is both heard and seen, 
and important results issue from this fact. 
The play-story is actually seen instead of seen 
by the eye of the imagination through the ap- 
peal of the printed page; or indirectly again, 
if one hears a narrative recited. And this ac- 
tual seeing on the stage brings conviction, 
since "seeing is believing," by the old saw. 
Scenery, too, necessitates a certain truthful- 
ness in the reproducing of life by word and 
act and scene, because the spectator, who is 
able to judge it all by the test of life, will more 
readily compare the mimic representation with 
the actuality than if he were reading the words 
of a character in a book, or being told, narra- 
tive fashion, of the character's action. In this 
way the stage story seems nearer life. 

Moreover, the seeing is fortified by hear- 
ing; the spectator is also the auditor. And 
here is another test of reality. If the intona- 
tion or accent or tone of voice of the actor is 
not life-like and in consonance with the char- 
acter portrayed, the audience will instantly be 

6 



PLAY, A FORM OF STORY TELLING 

quicker to detect it and to criticize than if the 
same character were shown in fiction; seeing, 
the spectator insists that dress and carriage, 
and scenery, which furnishes a congruous back- 
ground, shall be plausible; and hearing, the 
auditor insists upon the speech being true to 
type. 

The play has an immense superiority also 
over all printed literature in that, making its 
appeal directly through eye and ear, it is not 
literary at all; I mean, the story in this form 
can be understood and enjoyed by countless 
who read but little or even cannot read. Liter- 
ature, in the conventional sense, may be a closed 
book to innumerable theater-goers who never- 
theless can witness a drama and react to its 
exhibition of life. The word, which in printed 
letters is so all-important, on the stage becomes 
secondary to action and scene, for the story 
can be, and sometimes is, enacted in panto- 
mime, without a single word being spoken. In 
essence, therefore, a play may be called un- 
literary, and thus it makes a wider, more demo- 
cratic appeal than anything in print can. Yet, 

7 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

by an interesting paradox, when the words of 
the play are written by masters Hke Calderon, 
Shakespeare, Moliere or Ibsen, the drama be- 
comes the chief literary glory of Spain, Eng- 
land, France and Norway. For in the final 
reckoning only the language that is fit and fine 
preserves the drama of the world in books and 
classifies it with creative literature. Thus the 
play can be all things to all men; at once un- 
literary in its appeal, and yet, in the finest ex- 
amples, an important contribution to letters. 
A peculiar advantage of the play over the 
other story-telling forms is found in the fact 
that while one reads the printed story, short 
or long, the epic or ballad, by oneself in the 
quiet enjoyment of the library, one witnesses 
the drama in company with many other human 
beings— unless the play be a dire failure and 
the house empty. And this association, though 
it may remove some of the more refined and 
aristocratic experiences of the reader, has a 
definite effect upon individual pleasure in the 
way of enrichment, and even reacts upon the 
play itself to shape its nature, A curious sort 

a 



PLAY, A FORM OF STORY TELLING 

of sympathy is set up throughout an audience 
as it receives the skillful story of the play- 
wright; common or crowd emotions are 
aroused, personal variations are submerged in 
a general associative feeling and the individual 
does not so much laugh, cry and wonder by 
himself as do these things sympathetically in 
conjunction with others. He becomes a sim- 
pler, less complex person whose emotions domi- 
nate the analytic processes of the individual 
brain. He is a more plastic receptive creature 
than he would be alone. Any one can test this 
for himself by asking if he would have laughed 
so uproariously at a certain humorous speech 
had it been offered him detached from the time 
and place. The chances are that, by and in 
itself, it might not seem funny at all. And 
the readiness with which he fell into cordial 
conversation with the stranger in the next seat 
is also a hint as to his magnetized mood when 
thus subjected to the potent influence of mob 
psychology. For this reason, then, among 
others, a drama heard and seen under the usual 
conditions secures unique eff'ects of response 

9 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

in contrast with the other sister forms of tell- 
ing stories. 

A heightening of effect upon auditor and 
spectator is gained — to mention one other ad- 
vantage — by the fact that the story which in 
a work of fiction may extend to a length pre- 
cluding the possibility of its reception at one 
sitting, may in the theater be brought within 
the compass of an evening, in the time between 
dinner and bed. This secures a unity of im- 
pression whereby the play is a gainer over the 
novel. A great piece of fiction like David 
Copperfield, or Tom Jones, or A Modern In- 
stance, or Alice for Short cannot be read in 
a day, except as a feat of endurance and under 
unusual privileges of time to spare. But a 
great play — Shakespeare's Hamlet or Ibsen's 
A DolVs House — can be absorbed in its en- 
tirety in less than three hours, and while the 
hearer has perhaps not left his seat. Other 
things being equal, and whatever the losses, 
this establishes a superiority for the play. A 
coherent section of life, which is what the story 
should be, conveyed in the whole by this brev- 

10 



PLAY, A FORM OF STORY TELLING 

ity of execution, so that the recipient may get 
a full sense of its organic unity, cannot but 
be more impressive than any medium of story 
telling where this is out of the question. The 
merit of the novel, therefore, supreme in its 
way, is another merit; "one star differeth 
from another in glory." It will be recalled 
that Poe, with this matter of brevity of time 
and unity of impression in mind, declared that 
there was no such thing as a long poem; mean- 
ing that only the short poem which could be 
read through at one sitting could attain to the 
highest effects. 

But along with these advantages go certain 
limitations, too, in this form of story telling; 
limitations which warn the play not to en- 
croach upon the domain of fiction, and which 
have much to do with making the form what 
it is. 

From its very nature the novel can be more 
thorough-going in the delineation of character. 
The drama, as we have seen, must, under its 
stern restrictions of time, seize upon outstand- 
ing traits and assume that much of the develop- 

11 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

ment has taken place before the rise of the 
first curtain. The novel shows character in 
process of development; the play shows what 
character, developed to the point of test, will 
do when the test comes. Its method, especially 
in the hands of modern playwrights like Ibsen 
and Shaw, is to exhibit a hmnan being acted 
upon suddenly by a situation which exposes 
the hidden springs of action and is a culmina- 
tion of a long evolution prior to the plot that 
falls within the play proper. In the drama 
characters must for the most part be displayed 
in external acts, since action is of the very es- 
sence of a play ; in a novel, slowly and through 
long stretches of time, not the acts alone but 
the thoughts, motives and desires of the char- 
acter may be revealed. Obviously, in the drama 
this cannot be done, in any like measure, in 
spite of the fact that some of the late psychol- 
ogists of the drama, like Galsworthy, Bennett 
and others, have tried to introduce a more care- 
ful psychology into their play-making. At 
the best, only an approximation to the subtlety 
and penetration of fiction can be thus attained. 

12 



PLAY, A FORM OF STORY TELLING 

It were wiser to recognize the limitation and 
be satisfied with the compensating gain of the 
more vivid, compeUing effect secured through 
the method of presenting human beings, nat- 
ural to the playhouse. 

There are also arbitrary and artificial con- 
ventions of the stage conditioning the story 
which may perhaps be regarded as drawbacks 
where the story in fiction is freer in these re- 
spects. Both forms of story telling strive- 
never so eagerly as to-day — for a truthful rep- 
resentation of life. The stage, traditionally, 
in its depiction of character through word 
and action, has not been so close to life as 
fiction; the dialogue has been further removed 
from the actual idiom of human speech. 
It is only of late that stage talk in naturalness 
has begun to rival the verisimilitude of dia- 
logue in the best fiction. This may well be for 
the reason (already touched upon) that the 
presence of the speakers on the stage has in 
itself a reality which corrects the artificiality 
of the words spoken. "I did not know," the 
theater auditor might be imagined as saying, 

13 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

"that people talked like that; but there they 
are, talking; it must be so." 

The drama in all lands is trying as never 
before to represent life in speech as well as act ; 
and the strain hitherto put upon the actor, who 
in the past had as part of his function to make 
the artificial and unreal plausible and artistic, 
has been so far removed as to enable him to 
give his main strength to genuine interpreta- 
tion. 

The time values on the stage are a limitation 
which makes for artificiality ; actual time must 
of necessity be shortened, for if true chron- 
ology were preserved the play would be ut- 
terly balked in its purpose of presenting a 
complete story that, however brief, must cover 
more time than is involved in what is shown 
upon the boards of a theater. As a result all 
time values undergo a proportionate shrink- 
age. This can be estimated by the way meals 
are eaten on the stage. In actual life twenty 
minutes are allotted for the scamped eating 
time of the railway station, and we all feel it as 
a grievance. Half an hour is scant decency for 

14^ 



PLAY, A FORM OF STORY TELLING 

the unpretentious private meal; and as it be- 
comes more formal an hour is better, and sev- 
eral hours more likely. Yet no play could af- 
ford to allow twenty minutes for this function, 
even were it a meal of state ; it would consume 
half an act, or thereabouts. Consequently, on 
the stage, the effect of longer time is produced 
by letting the audience see the general details 
of the feast ; food eaten, wine drunk, servants 
waiting, and conversation interpolated. It is 
one of the demands made upon the actor's skill 
to make all these condensed and selected minu- 
tiae of a meal stand for the real thing; once 
more art is rearranging life, under severe pres- 
sure. If those interested will test with watch in 
hand the actual time allowed for the banquet in 
A Parisian Romance, so admirably envisaged 
by the late Richard Mansfield, or the famous 
Thanksgiving dinner scene in Shore Acres, fra- 
grantly associated with the memory of the late 
James A. Heme, they will possibly be sur- 
prised at the brevity of such representations. 
Because of this necessary compression, a 
scale of time has to be adopted which shall se- 

15 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

cure an effect of actualness by a cunning obey- 
ance of proportion; the reduction of scale is 
skillful, and so the result is congruous. And it 
is plain that fiction may take more time if it so 
desires in such scenes; although even in the 
novel the actual time consumed by a formal 
dinner would be reproduced by the novelist at 
great risk of boring his reader. 

Again, with disadvantages in mind, it might 
be asserted that the stage story suffers in that 
some of the happenings involved in the plot 
must perforce transpire off stage; and when 
this is so there is an inevitable loss of effect, in- 
asmuch as it is of the nature of drama, as has 
been noted, to show events, and the indirect 
narrative method is to be avoided as undra- 
matic. Tyros in play- writing fail to make this 
distinction; and as a generalization it may be 
stated that whenever possible a play should 
show a thing, rather than state it. "Seeing is 
believing," to repeat the axiom. Yet a quali- 
fier may here be made, for in certain kinds of 
drama or when a certain effect is striven for 
the indirect method may be powerfully eff ec- 

16 



PLAY, A FORM OF STORY TELLING 

tive. The murder in Macbeth gains rather 
than loses because it takes place outside the 
scene; Maeterlinck in his earlier Plays for 
Marionettes, so called, secured remarkable ef- 
fects of suspense and tension by systematically 
using the principle of indirection; as where in 
The Seven Princesses the princesses who are 
the particular exciting cause of the play are 
not seen at all by the audience ; the impression 
they make, a great one, comes through their 
effect upon certain characters on the stage and 
this heightens immensely the dramatic value of 
the unseen figures. We may point to the 
Greeks, too, in illustration, who in their great 
folk dramas of legend regularly made use of 
the principle of indirect narration when the 
aim was to put before the vast audiences the 
terrible occurrences of the fable, not coram 
populOj, as Horace has it, not in the presence of 
the audience, but rather off stage. Neverthe- 
less, these exceptions can be explained without 
violating the general principle that in a stage 
story it is always dangerous not to exhibit any 
action that is vital to the play. And this com- 

17 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

pulsion, it will be evident, is a restriction which 
may at times cripple the scope of the dramatist, 
while yet it stimulates his skill to overcome the 
difficulty. 

Summarizing the differences which go to 
make drama distinctive as a story-telling form 
and distinguish it from other story molds: a 
play in contrast with fiction tells its tale by 
word, act and scene in a rising scale of impor- 
tance, and within briefer time limits, necessi- 
tating a far more careful selection of mate- 
rial, and a greater emphasis upon salient mo- 
ments in the handling of plot ; and because of 
the device of act divisions, with certain mo- 
ments of heightened interest culminating in a 
central scene and thus gaining in tension and 
intensity by this enforced method of compres- 
sion and stress ; while losing the opportunity to 
amplify and more carefully to delineate char- 
acter. It gains as well because the story comes 
by the double receipt of the eye and ear to 
a theater audience some of whom at least, 
through illiteracy, might be unable to appre- 
ciate the story printed in a book. The play 

18 



PLAY, A FORM OF STORY TELLING 

thus is the most democratic and popular form 
of story telling, and at the same time is capable 
of embodying, indeed has embodied, the great- 
est creative literature of various nations. And 
for a generation now, increasingly, in the Eu- 
ropean countries and in English-speaking 
lands, the play has begun to come into its own 
as an art form with unique advantages in the 
way of wide appeal and cultural possibilities. 



19 



CHAPTER II 

THE PLAY^ A CULTURAL OPPORTUNITY 

/CERTAIN remarks at the close of the 
^^ preceding chapter hint at what is in mind 
in giving a title to the present one. The play, 
this democratic mode of story telling, attract- 
ing vast numbers of hearers and universally 
popular because man is ever avid of amuse- 
ment and turns hungrily to such a medium 
as the theater to satisfy a deeply implanted in- 
stinct for pleasure, can be made an experience 
to the auditor properly to be included in what 
he would call his cultural opportunity. That 
is to say, it can take its place among those civil- 
izing agencies furnished by the arts and let- 
ters, travel and the higher aspects of social 
life. A drama, as this book seeks to show, is 
in its finest estate a work of art comparable 
with such other works of art as pictures, statu- 
ary, musical compositions and the achievements 

20 



PLAY, CULTURAL OPPORTUNITY 

of the book world. I shall endeavor later to 
show a little more in detail wherein lie the ar- 
tistic requirements and successes of the play; 
and a suggestion of this has been already made 
in chapter one. 

But this thought of the play as a work of art 
has hardly been in the minds of folk of our 
race and speech until the recent awakening of 
an enlightened interest in things dramatic; a 
movement so brief as to be embraced by the 
present generation. The theater has been re- 
garded carelessly, thoughtlessly, merely^is a 
place^^f idle amusement, or worse; ignorant 
prejudice against it has been rife, with a nat- 
ural reaction for the worse upon the institu- 
tion itself. The play has neither been asso- 
ciated with a serious treatment of life nor with 
the refined pleasure derivable from contact 
with art. Nor, although the personality of 
actors has always been acclaimed, and an in- 
finite amount of silly chatter about their pri- 
vate lives been constant, have theater-goers as 
a class realized the distinguished skill of the 
dramatist in the handling of a very difficult 

21 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

and delicate art, nor done justice to the art 
which the actor represents, nor to his own ar- 
tistry in it. But now a change has come, hap- 
pily. The English-speaking lands have begun 
at least to get into line with other enlightened 
countries, to coniprehend the educational value 
of the playhouse, and the consequent impor- 
tance of the play. The rapid growth to-day in 
what may be called social consciousness has 
quickened our sense of the social significance 
of an institution that, whatever its esthetic and 
intellectual status, is an enormous influence in 
the daily life of the multitude. Gradually 
those who think have come to see that the thea- 
ter, this people's pleasure, should offer drama 
that is rational, wholesome amusement; that 
society in general has a vital stake in the na- 
ture of an entertainment so widely diffused, so 
imperatively demanded and so surely effective 
in shaping the ideals of the people at large. 
The final chapter will enlarge upon this sug- 
gestion. 

And this idea has grown along with the now 
very evident re-birth of a drama which, while 

22 



PLAY, CULTURALOPPORTUNITY 

practical stage material, has taken on the lit- 
erary graces and makes so strong an appeal 
as literature that much of our best in letters is 
now in dramatic form: the play being the 
most notable contribution, after the novel, of 
our time. Leading writers everywhere are 
practical dramatists; men of letters, yet also 
men of the theater, who write plays not only 
to be read but to be acted, and who have con- 
quered the difficult technic of the drama so as 
to kill two birds with the one stone. 

The student of historical drama will perceive 
that this welcome change is but a return to 
earlier and better conditions when the mighty 
play-makers of the past — Calderon, Moliere, 
Shakespeare and their compeers — were also 
makers of literature which we still read with 
delight. And, without referring to the past, 
a glance at foreign lands will reveal the fact 
that other countries, if not our own, have al- 
ways recognized this cultural value of the stage 
and hence given the theater importance in the 
civic or national life, often spending public 
moneys for its maintenance and using it (often 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

in close association with music) as a central 
factor in national culture. The traveler to-day 
in Germany, France, Russia and the Scandi- 
navian lands cannot but be impressed with this 
fact, and will bring home to America some 
suggestive lessons for patriotic native appre- 
ciation. In the modern educational scheme, 
then, room should be made for some training 
in intelligent play going. So far from there 
being anything Quixotic in the notion, all the 
signs are in its favor. The feeling is spread- 
ing fast that school and college must include 
theater culture in the curriculum and people at 
large are seeking to know something of the 
significance of the theater in its long evolution 
from its birth to the present, of the history of 
the drama itself, of the nature of a play re- 
garded as a work of art ; of the specific values, 
too, of the related art of the actor who alone 
makes the drama vital; and of the relative ex- 
cellencies, in the actual playhouses of our time, 
of plays, players and playwrights; together 
with some idea of the rapidly changing pres- 
ent-day conditions. Such changes include the 

24 



PLAY, CULTURALOPPORTUNITY 

coming of the one-act play, the startling de- 
velopment of the moving picture, the growth 
of the Little Theater, the rise of the masque 
and pageant, and so on with other manifesta- 
tions yet. Surely, some knowledge in a field 
so broad and humanly appealing, both for le- 
gitimate enjoyment of the individual and in 
view of his obligations to fellow man, is of 
equal moment to a knowledge of the chemical 
effect of hydrochloric acid upon marble, or of 
the working of a table of logarithms. These 
last are less involved in the living of a normal 
human being. 

Here are signs of the time, which mark a 
revolution in thought. In the light of such 
facts, it is curious to reflect upon the neglect 
of the theater hitherto for centuries as an in- 
stitution and the refusal to think of the play 
as worthy until it was offered upon the printed 
page. The very fact that it was exhibited on 
the stage seemed to stamp it as below serious 
consideration. And that, too, when the very 
word play implies that it is something to be 
played. The taking over of the theaters by 

25 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

uneducated persons to whom such a place was, 
Hke a department store, simply an emporium 
of desired commodities, together with the Puri- 
tanic feeling that the playhouse, as such, was 
an evil thing frowned upon by God and in- 
jurious to man, combined to set this form of 
entertainment in ill repute. Bernard Shaw, in 
that brilliant little play. The Dark Lady of 
the Sonnets^ sets certain shrewd words in the 
mouths of Shakespeare and Queen Elizabeth 
pertinent to this thought : 

Shakespeare: "Of late, as you know, the 
Church taught the people by means of plays; 
but the people flocked only to such as were full 
of superstitious miracles and bloody martyr- 
doms; and so the Church, which also was just 
then brought into straits by the policy of your 
royal father, did abandon and discountenance 
playing ; and thus it fell into the hands of poor 
players and greedy merchants that had their 
pockets to look to and not the greatness of 
your kingdom." 

Elizabeth: "Master Shakespeare, you 
speak sooth ; I cannot in anywise amend it. I 

26 



PLAY, CULTURALOPPORTUNITY 

dare not offend my unruly Puritans by mak- 
ing so lewd a place as the playhouse a public 
charge; and there be a thousand things to be 
done in this London of mine before your 
poetry can have its penny from the general 
purse. I tell thee, Master Will, it will be three 
hundred years before my subjects learn that 
man cannot live by bread alone, but by every 
word that cometh from the mouth of those 
whom God inspires." 

The height of the incongruous absurdity 
was illustrated in the former teaching of 
Shakespeare. Here was a writer incessantly 
hailed as the master poet of the race ; he bulked 
large in school and college, perforce. Yet the 
teacher was confronted by the embarrassing 
fact that Shakespeare was also an actor: a pro- 
fession given over to the sons of Belial; and 
a playwright who actually wrote his immortal 
poetry in the shape of theater plays. This was 
sad, indeed! The result was that in both the 
older teaching and academic criticism emphasis 
was always placed upon Shakespeare the poet, 
the great mind; and Shakespeare the play- 

27 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

wright was hardly explained at all; or if ex- 
plained the illumination was more like dark- 
ness visible, because those in the seats of 
judgment were so ignorant of play technic 
and the requirements of the theater as to 
make their attempts well-nigh useless. It re- 
mained for our own time and scholars like 
George P. Baker and Brander Matthews, 
with intelligent, sympathetic comprehension of 
the play as a form of art and the playhouse as 
conditioning it, to study the Stratford bard 
primarily as playwright and so give us a new 
and more accurate portrait of him as man and 
creative worker. 

I hope it is beginning to be apparent that in- 
telligent playgoing starts long before one goes 
to the theater. It means, for one thing, some 
acquaintance with the history of drama, and the 
theater which is its home, both in the develop- 
ment of English culture and that of other im- 
portant nations whose dramatic contribution 
has been large. This aspect of culture will be 
enlarged upon in the following chapters. 

Much can be done — far more than has been 



PLAY, CULTURALOPPORTUNITY 

done — in this historical survey in school and 
college to prepare American citizens for ra- 
tional theater enjoyment. There is nothing 
pedantic in such preparation. Nobody ob- 
jects to being suiSciently trained in art to dis- 
tinguish a chromo from an oil masterpiece or 
to know the difference in music between a 
cheap organ-grinder jingle and the rhythmic 
marvels of a Chopin. It is equally foolish to 
be unable to give a reason for the preference 
for a play by Shaw or Barrie over the mean- 
ingless coarse farce by some stage hack. It is 
all in the day's culture and when once the idea 
that the theater is an art has been firmly seized 
and conmiunicated to many all that seems bi- 
zarre in such a thought will disappear — and 
good riddance! 

The first and fundamental duty to the thea- 
ter is to attend the play worthy of patronage. 
If one be a theater-goer, yet has never taken 
the trouble to see a certain drama that adorns 
the playhouse, one is open to criticism. The 
abstention, when the chance was offered, must 
in fact either be a criticism of the play or of 

29 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

the person himself because he refrained from 
supporting it. 

But let it be assumed that our theater-goer 
is in his seat, ready to do his part in the pa- 
tronage of a good play. How, once there, shall 
he show the approval, or at least interest, his 
presence implies? 

By making himself a part of the sympa- 
thetic psychology of the audience, as a whole; 
not resisting the effect by a position of in- 
tellectual aloofness natural to a human being 
burdened with the self -consciousness that he is 
a critic ; but gladly recognizing the human and 
artistic qualities of the entertainment. Next, 
by giving external sign of this sympathetic 
approval by applause. Applause in this coim- 
try generally means the clapping of the hands ; 
only exceptionally, and in large cities, do we 
hear the bravos customary in Europe. 

But suppose the play merit not approval but 
the reverse; what then? The gallery gods, 
those disthroned deities, were wont more rudely 
to supplement this manual testimony by the 
use of their other extremities, the feet. The 

30 



PLAY, CULTURAL OPPORTUNITY 

effect, however, is not desirable. Yet, in re- 
spect of this matter of disapproval, it would 
seem as if the British in their frank booing of 
a piece which does not meet their wishes were 
exercising a valuable check upon bad drama. 
In the United States we signify positive ap- 
proval, but not its negation. The result is 
that the cheaper element of an audience may 
applaud and so help the fate of a poor play, 
while the hostility of those better fitted to 
judge is unknown to all concerned with the 
fortunes of the drama, because it is thus silent. 
A freer use of the hiss, heard with us only 
under rare circumstances of provocation, might 
be a salutary thing, for this reason. An audi- 
ble expression of reproof would be of value in 
the case of many unworthy plays. 

But perhaps in the end the rebuke of non- 
attendance and the influence of the minatory 
word passed on to others most assists the fail- 
ure of the play that ought to fail. If the fool- 
ish auditor approve where he should condemn, 
and so keep the bad play alive by his backing, 
the better view has a way of winning at the 

31 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

last. Certainly, for conspicuous success some 
qualities of excellence, if not all of them, must 
be present. 

But intelligent play-going means also a per- 
ception of the art of acting, so that the tech- 
nic of the player, not his personality, will 
command the auditor's trained attention and 
he will approve skill and frown upon its ab- 
sence. 

And while it is undoubtedly more difficult to 
convey this information educationally, the 
ideal way being to see the best acting early and 
late and to reflect upon it in the light of ac- 
knowledged principles, something can certain- 
ly be done to prepare prospective theater-goers 
for appreciation of the profession of the play- 
er; substituting for the blind, time-honored 
"I know what I like," the more civilized: "I 
approve it for the following good and suffi- 
cient reasons." Even in school, and still more 
in college, the teacher can cooperate with the 
taught by suggesting the plays to be seen, 
amateur as well as professional; and by class- 
room discussion afterward, not only of the 

S2 



PLAY, CULTURAL OPPORTUNITY 

plays but concerning their rendition. Students 
are quick to respond when this is done, for the 
vital object lesson of current drama always ap- 
peals to them, and they are glad to observe a 
connection between their amusement and their 
culture. At present, or at least up to a very 
recent time, the eccentricity of such a pro- 
cedure would all but have endangered the po- 
sition of the teacher so foolhardy as to act upon 
the assumption that the drama seen the night 
before could be in any way used to impart 
permanent lessons concerning a great art to 
the minds of the pupils. Luckily, a more lib- 
eral view is taking the place of this crass Phil- 
istinism. 

In a proper appreciation of the actor the 
hearer will look beyond the pulchritude of an 
actress or the fit of an actor's clothes; he will 
judge Miss Ethel Barrymore by her power of 
envisaging the part she assumes, and not be 
overly interested in an argument as to her in- 
crease of avoirdupois of late years. He will 
not allow himself to consume time over the 
question whether Mr. William Gillette in pri- 

33 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

vate life is addicted to chloral because Sher- 
lock Holmes is a victim of that most repre- 
hensible habit. 

And above all he will constantly remind him- 
self that acting is the art of impersonation, 
exactly that; and, therefore, just as high praise 
goes to the player who admirably portrays a 
disagreeable part as to one in whose mouth 
the playwright has set lines which make him 
beloved from curtain to curtain. Yet the ma- 
jority of persons in a typical American thea- 
ter audience hopefully confuse the part with 
the player, and award praise or blame accord- 
ing as they like or dislike the part itself. 

The intelligent auditor will also give ap- 
proval to the stage artist who, instead of draw- 
ing attention to himself by the use of exag- 
gerated methods, quietly does his work, keeps 
always within the stage picture, and trusts to 
his truthful representation to secure conviction 
and reward. How common is it to see some 
player overstressing his part, who, instead of 
being boohed and hissed as he deserves and as 
he infallibly would be in some countries, re- 

34 



PLAY, CULTURAL OPPORTUNITY 

ceives but the more applause for his inexcus- 
able overstepping of the modesty of his art. 
It becomes part of the duty of our intelligent 
playgoer to teach such pseudo-artists their 
place, for as long as they win the meed of ill- 
timed and ignorant approval, so long will they 
flourish. 

Nor will the critic of the acceptable actor fail 
to observe that the latter prefers working for 
the ensemble — team work, in the sporting 
phrase — to that personal display dispropor- 
tionate to the general eifect which will always 
make the judicious grieve. In theatrical par- 
lance, "hogging the stage" has flourished sim- 
ply for the reason that it deceives a sufficient 
number in the seats to secure applause and so 
throws dust in the eyes of the general public 
as to its true iniquity. The actor is properly 
to be judged, not by his work detached from 
that of his fellows, but ever in relation to the 
totality of impression which means a play in- 
stead of a personal exhibition. It is his busi- 
ness to cooperate with others in a single effect 
in which each is a factor in the exact measure 

35 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

of the importance of his part as conceived by 
the dramatist. Where a minor part becomes 
a major one through the abihty of a player, as 
in the famous case of the elder Sothern's Lord 
Dundreary, it is at the expense of the play; 
Our American Cousin was negligible as drama, 
and hence it did not matter. But if the drama 
is worth while, serious injury to dramatic art 
may follow. 

Again, the intelligent play-goer will care- 
fully distinguish in his mind between actor 
and playwright. Realizing that "the play's the 
thing," he will demand that even the so-called 
star (too often an actor foisted into promi- 
nence for a non-artistic reason) shall obey the 
laws of his art and those of drama, and not 
unduly minimize for personal reasons the work 
of his coadjutors in the play, nor that of the 
playwright who intended him to go so far and 
no further. The actor who, whatever his fame, 
and no matter how much an unthinking au- 
dience is complaisant when he does it, makes 
a practice of giving himself a center-of-the- 
stage prominence beyond what the drama calls 

36 



PLAY, CULTURAL OPPORTUNITY 

for, is no artist, but a show man, neither more 
nor less, who deserves to be rated with the 
mountebanks rather than with the artists of 
his profession. But it may be feared that 
"stars" will continue to seek the stage center 
and crowd others of the cast out of the right 
focus, to say nothing of distorting the work 
of the dramatist, under the goad of megalo- 
mania, so long as a goodly number of unin- 
telligent spectators egg him on. His favorite 
line of poetry will be that of Wordsworth: 

"Fair as a star when only one is shining in 
the sky." It is to help the personnel of such 
an audience that our theater-goer needs his 
training. 

A general realization of all this will defi- 
nitely affect one's theater habit and make for 
the good of all that concerns the art of the 
playhouse. It will lead the properly prepared 
person to see a good play competently done, 
but with no supreme or far-famed actor in the 
company, in preference to a foolish play, or 
worse, carried by a "star" ; or a play negligible 
as art or hopelessly passe as art or interpreta- 

37 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

tion of life for which an all-star cast has been 
provided, as if to take the eye of the spectator 
off the weaknesses of the drama. Often a 
standard play revived by one of these hastily 
gathered companies of noted players resolves 
itself into an interest in individual perform- 
ances which must lack that organic unity which 
comes of longer association. The opportu- 
nity afforded to get a true idea of the play is 
made quite secondary, and sometimes entirely 
lost sight of. 

Nor will the trained observer in the theater 
be cheated by the dollar mark in his theatrical 
entertainment. He will come to feel that an 
adequate stock company, playing the best plays 
of the day, may afford him more of drama 
culture for an expenditure of fifty cents for 
an excellent seat than will some second-rate 
traveling company which presents a drama that 
is a little more recent but far less worthy, to 
see which the charge is three or four times that 
modest sum. All over the land to-day nomi- 
nally cultivated folk will turn scornfully away 
from a fifty-cent show, as they call it, only be- 

38 



PLAY, CULTURAL OPPORTUNITY 

cause it is cheap in the literal sense, whereas 
the high-priced offering is cheap in every other 
sense hut the cost of the seat. Such people 
overlook the nature of the play presented, the 
playwright's reputation, and the quality of the 
performance ; incapable of judging by the real 
tests, they stand confessed as vulgarians and 
ignoramuses of art. We shall not have intel- 
ligent audiences in American theaters, speak- 
ing by and large, until theater-goers learn to 
judge dramatic wares by some other test than 
what it costs to buy them. Such a test is a 
crude one, in art, however infallible it may be in 
purely material commodities; indeed, is it not 
the wise worldling in other fields who becomes 
aware in his general bartering that it is un- 
safe to estimate his purchase exclusively by the 
price tag? 

To one who in this way makes the effort to 
inform himself with regard to the things of 
the theater — plays, players and playwrights — 
concerning dramatic history both as it apper- 
tains to the drama and the theater; and con- 
cerning the intellectual as well as esthetical and 

39 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

human values of the theater-going experience, 
it will soon become apparent that it offers him 
cultural opportunity that is rich, wide and of 
ever deepening enjoyment. And taking ad- 
vantage of it, he will dignify one of the most 
appealing pleasures of civilization by making 
it a part of his permanent equipment for satis- 
factory living. 

Other aspects of this thought may now be 
expounded, beginning with a review of the 
play in its history; some knowledge of which 
is obviously an element in the complete appre- 
ciation of a theater evening. For the proper 
viewing of a given play one should have re- 
viewed plays in general, as they constitute the 
body of a worthy dramatic literature. 



40 



CHAPTER III 

UP TO SHAKESPEARE 

fTHHE recent vogue of plays like The Ser- 
^ vant in the House, The Passing of the 
Third Floor Backj The Dawn of To-morrow^ 
and Everywoman sends the mind back to the 
early history of English drama and is full of 
instruction. Such drama is a reversion to type, 
it suggests the origin of all drama in religion. 
It raises the interesting question whether the 
blase modern theater world will not respond, 
even as did the primitive audiences of the mid- 
dle ages, to plays of spiritual appeal, even of 
distinct didactic purpose. And the suggestion 
is strengthened when the popularity is recalled 
of the morality play of Everyman a few years 
since, that being a revival of a typical 
mediaeval drama of the kind. It almost looks 
as if we had failed to take into account the 
ready response of modern men and women to 

41 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

the higher motives on the stage ; have failed to 
credit the substratum of seriousness in that 
chance collection of human beings which con- 
stitutes a theater audience. After all, they are 
very much like children, when under the in- 
fluence of mob psychology; sensitive, plastic 
to the lofty and noble as they are to the baser 
suggestions that come to them across the foot- 
lights. In any case, these late experiences, 
which came by way of surprise to the profes- 
sional purveyors of theatrical entertainment, 
give added emphasis to the statement that the 
stage is the child of mother church, and that 
the origin of drama in the countries whereof 
we have record is always religious. The me- 
diaeval beginnings in Europe and England 
have been described in their details by many 
scholars. Suffice it here to say that the play's 
birthplace is at the altar end of the cathedral, 
an extension of the regular service. The actors 
were priests, the audience the vast hushed 
throngs moved upon by incense, lights, music, 
and the intoned sacred words, and, for the 
touch of the dramatic which was to be the seed 

42 



UP TO SHAKESPEARE 

of a wonderful development, we may add some 
portion of the sacred story acted out by the 
stoled players and envisaged in the scenic pomp 
of the place. The lesson of the holy day was 
thus brought home to the multitude as it never 
would have been by the mere recital of the 
Latin words; scene and action lent their per- 
suasive power to the natural associations of 
thfi church. Such is the source of modern 
drama; what was in the course of time to be- 
come "mere amusement," in the foolish phrase, 
began as worship; and if we go far back into 
the Orient, or to the south-lying lands on the 
Mediterranean, we find in India and Greece 
alike this union of art and worship, whether 
the play began within church or temple or be- 
fore Dionysian altars reared upon the green 
sward. The good and the beautiful, the esthetic 
and the spiritual, ever intertwined in the story 
of primitive culture. 

And the gradual growth from this mediaeval 
beginning is clear. First, a scenic elaboration 
of part of the service, centering in some por- 
tion of the life and death of Christ ; then, as the 

43 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

scenic side grew more complex, a removal to 
the grounds outside the cathedral ; an extension 
of the subject-matter to include a reverent 
treatment of other portions of the Bible nar- 
rative; next, the taking over of biblical drama 
by the guilds, or crafts, under the auspices of 
the patron saints of the various organizations, 
as when, on Corpus Christi day, one of the 
great saints' days of the year, a cycle of plays 
was presented in a town with the populace 
agog to witness it, and the movable vans fol- 
lowed each other at the street corners, present- 
ing scene after scene of the story. Then a fur- 
ther extension of motives which admitted the 
use of the lives of the saints who presided over 
the guilds ; and finally the further enlargement 
of theme due to the writing of drama of which 
the personages were abstract moral qualities, 
giving the name of Morality to this kind of 
play. Such, described with utter simplicity 
and brevity, was the interesting evolution. 

Aside from all technicalities, and stripped of 
much of moment to the specialist, we have in 
this origin and early development a blend of 

44 



UP TO SHAKESPEARE 

amusement and instruction; a religious pur- 
pose linked with a frank recognition of the 
fact that if you make worship attractive you 
strengthen its hold upon mankind — a truth 
sadly lost sight of by the later Puritans. The 
church was wise, indeed, to unite these elements 
of life, to seize upon the psychology of the 
show and to use it for the purpose of saving 
souls. It was not until the sixteenth century 
and the immediate predecessors of Shake- 
speare that the play, under the influence of 
renaissance culture and the inevitable seculari- 
zation of the theater in antagonism to the Puri- 
tan view of amusement, waxed worldly, and 
little by little lost the earmarks of its holy birth 
and upbringing. 

The day when the priests, still the actors of 
the play, walked down the nave and issued 
from the great western door of the cathedral, 
to continue the dramatic representations under 
the open sky, was truly a memorable one in 
dramatic history. The first instinct was not 
that of secularization, but rather the desire for 
freer opportunity to enact the sacred stories; 

45 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

a larger stage, more scope for dramatic action. 
Yet, although for generations the play re- 
mained religious in subject-matter and intent, 
it was inevitable that in time it should come to 
realize that its function was to body forth hu- 
man life, unbounded by Bible themes : all that 
can happen to human beings on earth and be- 
tween heaven and hell and beyond them, being 
fit material for treatment, since all the world's 
a stage, and flesh and blood of more vital in- 
terest to humanity at large than aught else. 
The rapid humanization of the religious ma- 
terial can be easily traced in the coarse satire 
and broad humor introduced into the Bible nar- 
ratives: a free and easy handling of sacred 
scene and character natural to a more naive 
time and by no means implying irreverence. 
Thus, in the Noah story, Mrs. Noah becomes 
a stout shrew whose unwillingness to come in 
out of the wet and bestow herself in dry quar- 
ters in the Ark must have been hugely en- 
joyed by the fifteenth century populace. 
And the Vice of the morality play degen- 
erates into the clown of the performance, while 

46 



UP TO SHAKESPEARE 

even the Devil himself is made a cause for 
laughter. 

Another significant step in the advance of 
the drama was made when the crafts took over 
the representations; for it democratized the 
show, without cheapening it or losing sight of 
its instructional nature. When the booths, or 
pageants as they were called, drew up at the 
crossing of the ways and performed their part 
in some story of didactic purport and broadly 
human, hearty, English atmosphere, with an 
outdoor flavor and decorative features of 
masque and pageantry, the spectators saw the 
prototype of the historic pageants which just 
now are coming again into favor. The drama 
of the future was shaping in a matrix which 
was the best possible to assure a long life, un- 
der popular, natural conditions. These condi- 
tions were to be modified and distorted by 
other, later additions from the cultural in- 
fluence of the past and under the domination 
of literary traditions; but here was the orig- 
inal mold. 

The method of presentation, too, had its sure 
47 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

effect upon the theater which was to follow 
this popular folk beginning. The movable 
van, set upon wheels, with its space beneath 
where behind a curtain the actors changed their 
costumes, suggests in form and upfitting the 
first primitive stages of the playhouses erect- 
ed in the second half of the sixteenth century. 
Since but one episode or act of the play was 
to be given, there was no need of a change of 
scene, and the stage could be simple according- 
ly. Contemporary cuts show us the limited 
dimensions, the shallow depth and the bare- 
ness of accessories typical of this earliest of 
the housings of the drama, for such it might 
fairly be called. Obviously, on such a stage, the 
manner and method of portrayal are strictly 
defined: done out of doors, before a shifting 
multitude of all classes, with no close cohesion 
or unity, since another part of the story was 
told in another spot, the play, to get across — 
not the footlights, for there were none — but 
the intervening space which separated actors 
and audience, must be conveyed in broad sim- 
ple outline and in graphic episodes, the very 

48 



UP TO SHAKESPEARE 

attributes which to-day, despite all subtleties 
and finesse, can be relied upon to bring re- 
sponse from the spectators in a theater. It 
must have been a great event when, in some 
quiet English town upon a day significant in 
church annals, the players' booths began their 
cycle, and the motley crowd gathered to hear 
the Bible narratives familiar to each and all, 
even as the Greek myths which are the stock 
material of the Greek drama were known to 
the vast concourse in the hillside theater of that 
day. In effect the circus had come to town, 
and we may be sure every urchin knew it and 
could be found open-mouthed in the front row 
of spectators. No possibility here of subtlety 
and less of psychologic morbidity. The beat of 
the announcing drum, the eager murmur of 
the multitude, the gay costumes and colorful 
booth, all ministered to the natural delight of 
the populace in show and story. The fun re- 
lieved the serious matter, and the serious mat- 
ter made the fun acceptable. With no shift 
of scenery, the broadest liberty, not to say li- 
cense, in the particulars of time and place were 

49 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

practiced; the classic unities were for a later 
and more sophisticate drama. There was no 
curtain and therefore no entr'act to interrupt 
the two hours' traffic of the stage ; the play was 
continuous in a sense other than the modern. 

As a result of these early conditions, the 
English play was to show through its history 
a fluidity, a plastic adaptation of material to 
end, in sharp contrast with other nations, the 
French, for one, whose first drama was en- 
acted in a tennis court of fixed location, deep 
perspective and static scenery. 

On the holy days which, as the etymology 
shows, were also holidays from the point of 
view of the crowd, drama was vigorously pur- 
veyed which made the primitive appeals of 
pathos, melodrama, farce and comedy. The 
actors became secular, but for long they must 
have been inspired with a sense of moral ob- 
ligation in their work; a beautiful survival of 
which is to be seen at Oberammergau to-day. 
And the play itself remained religious in con- 
tent and intention for generations after it had 
walked out of the church door. The church 

50 



UP TO SHAKESPEARE 

took alarm at last, aware that an instrument 
of mighty potency had been taken out of its 
hands. It is not surprising to find various 
popes passing edicts against this new and 
growingly influential form of public entertain- 
ment. It seemed to be on the way to become 
a rival. This may well have had its effect in 
the rapid taking over of the drama by the 
guilds, as later it was adopted by still more 
worldly organizations. 

It was not from the people that the change 
to complete secularization of subject-matter 
and treatment came; but from higher cultural 
sources: from the schools and universities, 
touched by renaissance influences; as where 
Bishop Still produced Gammer Gurton's 
Needle for school use, the first English com- 
edy; or from court folk, as when Lord Buck- 
hurst with his associate, Sackville, wrote the 
frigid Gorhudoc based on the Senecan model 
and honorable historically because it is the first 
English tragedy. The play of Plautian deri- 
vation, Ralph Roister Doister, our first comedy 
of intrigue, is another example of cultural 

51 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

influences which came in to modify the 
main stream of development from the folk 
plays. 

This was in the sixteenth century, but for 
over two centuries the genuine English play 
had been forming itself in the religious nur- 
sery, as we saw. Now these other exotic and 
literary influences began to blend with the na- 
tive, and the story of the drama becomes there- 
fore more complex. The school and the court, 
classic literature and that of mediaeval Europe, 
which represented the humanism it begot, fast 
qualified the product. But the straightest, 
most natural issue from the naive morality 
and miracle genre is the robustious melodrama 
illustrated by such plays as Kyd's Spanish 
Tragedy and Marlowe's Edward II; which in 
turn lead directly on to Shakespeare's Titus 
Andronicus, Hamlet and chronicle history 
drama like Richard III; and on the side of 
farce. Gammer Gurtons Needle^ so broadly 
English in its fun, is in the line of descent. 
And in proportion as the popular elements of 
rhetoric, show and moralizing were retained, 

52 



UP TO SHAKESPEARE 

was the appeal to the general audience made, 
and the drama genuinely English. 

Up to 1576 we are concerned with the his- 
tory of the drama and there is no public thea- 
ter in the sense of a building erected for the- 
atrical performances. After the strolling play- 
ers with their booths, plays were given in 
scholastic halls, in schools and in private resi- 
dences; while the more democratic and direct 
descendant of the pageants is to be seen in the 
inn yards where the stable end of the courtyard, 
inclosed on three sides by its parallelogram 
of galleries, is the rudimentary plan for the 
Elizabethan playhouse, when it comes, toward 
the end of the sixteenth century. But with 
the year 1576 and the erection in Shoreditch 
of the first Theater on English soil — so called, 
because it had no rivals and the name was there- 
fore distinctive — ^the proper history of the in- 
stitution begins. It marks a most important 
forward step in dramatic progress. 

There is significance in the phrase descrip- 
tive of this first building ; it was set up "in the 
fields," as the words run: which means, beyond 

53 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

city limits, for the city fathers, increasingly 
Puritan in feeling, looked dubiously upon an 
amusement already so much a favorite with 
all classes; it might prove a moral as well as 
physical plague spot by its crowding together 
of a heterogeneous multitude within pent quar- 
ters. Once started, the theater idea met with 
such hospitable reception that these houses 
were rapidly increased, until by the century's 
end half a dozen of the curious wooden hex- 
agonal structures could be seen on the south- 
ward bank of the Thames, near the water, cen- 
tral in interest as we now look back upon them 
being The Globe, built in 1599 from the ma- 
terial of the demolished Shoreditch playhouse, 
and famed forever as Shakespeare's own 
house. Here at three o'clock of the afternoon 
upon a stage open to the sky and with the com- 
mon run of spectators standing in the pit where 
now lounge the luxuriant occupants of orches- 
tra seats, while those of the better sort sat on 
the stage or in the boxes which flanked the sides 
of the house and suggested the inn galleries of 
the earlier arrangement, were first seen the ro- 

54 



UP TO SHAKESPEARE 

bust predecessors of Shakespeare, Marlowe, 
and Kyd and Peele and Nash; and later, 
Shakespeare, Beaumont and Fletcher, Ben 
Jonson and the other immortals whose names 
are names to conjure with, even to this day. 
Played in the daylight, and most crudely light- 
ed, the play was deprived of the illusion pro- 
duced by modern artificial light, and the stage, 
projecting far down into the audience, made 
equally impossible the illusion of the prosce- 
nium arch, a picture stage set apart from life 
and constituting a world of its own for the 
representation of the mimic story. There was 
small need for make-up on the part of the 
actors, since the garish light of day is a sad 
revealer of grease paint and powder; and the 
flaring cressets of oil that did service as foot- 
lights must, it would seem, have made dark- 
ness visible, when set beside the modern de- 
vices. It is plain enough that under these con- 
ditions a performance of a play in the particu- 
lars of seeing and hearing must have been se- 
riously limited in effect. To reach the audience 
must have meant an appeal that was broadly 

55 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

human, and essentially dramatic. Fine lan- 
guage was indispensable; and a language 
drama is exactly what the Elizabethan theater 
gives us. Compelling interest of story, skillful 
mouthing of splendid poetry, virile situations 
that contained the blood and thunder elements 
always dear to the heart of the groundlings, 
these the play of that period had to have to 
hold the audiences. Impudent breakings in 
from the gentles who lounged on the stage and 
blew tobacco smoke from their pipes into the 
faces perchance of Burbage and Shakespeare 
himself; vulgar interpolations of some clown 
while the stage waited the entrance of a player 
delayed in the tiring room must have been daily 
occurrences. And yet, from such a stage, con- 
fined in extent and meager in fittings, and un- 
der such physical limitations of comfort and 
convenience, were the glories of the master poet 
given forth to the world. Our sense of the 
wonder of his work is greatly increased when 
we get a visualized comprehension of the con- 
ditions under which he accomplished it. It is 
well to add that one of the most fruitful phases 

56 



UP TO SHAKESPEARE 

of contemporary scholarship is that which has 
thrown so much hght upon the structure of the 
first Enghsh theaters. We now realize as 
never before the limits of the scenic represen- 
tation and the necessary restriction consequent 
upon the style of drama given. 

Another interesting and important consid- 
eration should also be noted here; and one too 
generally overlooked. The groundlings in the 
pit, albeit exposed to wind and weather and de- 
prived of the seats which minister to man's 
ease and presumably dispose him to a better 
reception of the piece, were yet in a position to 
witness the play as a play superior to that of 
the more aristocratic portions of the assem- 
blage. However charming it may have been 
for the sprigs of the nobility to touch elbows 
with Shakespeare on the boards as he delivered 
the tender lines of old Adam in As You Like 
It, or to exchange a word aside with Burbage 
just before he began the immortal soliloquy, 
''To be or not to be," it is certain that these 
gentry were not so advantageously placed to 
enjoy the rendition as a whole as were master 

57 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

Butcher or Baker at the front. And it would 
seem reasonable to believe that the nature of 
the Elizabethan play, so broadly humorous, so 
richly romantic, so large and obvious in its val- 
ues and languaged in a sort of surplusage of 
exuberance, is explained by the fact that it was 
the common herd to whom in particular the 
play was addressed in these early playhouses: 
not the literature in which it was written so 
much as the unfolding story and the tout en- 
semble which they were in a favorable position 
to take in. To the upper-class attendant at the 
play the unity of the piece must have been less 
dominant. And surely this must have tended 
to shape the play, to make it a democratic peo- 
ple's product. For it is an axiom that the 
dominant element in an audience settles the 
fate of a play. 

But this new plaything, the theater, was not 
only the physical embodiment of the drama, it 
became a social institution as well. Nor was it 
without its evils. The splendors of Elizabethan 
literature have often blinded criticism to the 
more sleazy aspects of the problem. But in- 

58 



UP TO SHAKESPEARE 

vestigation has made apparent enough that the 
Puritan attitude toward the new institution 
was not without its excuse. As we have seen, 
from the very first a respectable middle class 
element of society looked askance at the play- 
house, and while this view became exaggerated 
with the growth of Puritanism in England, 
there is nothing to be gained in idealizing the 
stage conditions of that time, nor, more broad- 
ly, to deny that the manner of life involved and 
in some regards the nature of the appeal at 
any period carry with them the likelihood of 
license and of dissipation. The actor before 
Shakespeare's day had little social or legal 
status; and despite all the leveling up of the 
profession due to him and his associates, the 
"strolling player" had to wait long before he 
became the self-respecting and courted individ- 
uality of our own day. Women did not act 
during the Elizabethan period, nor until the 
Restoration; so that one of the present pos- 
sibilities of corruption was not present. But 
on the other hand, the stage was without the 
restraining, refining influence of their pres- 

59 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

ence; a coarser tone could and did prevail as 
a result. The fact that ladies of breeding 
wore masks at the theater and continued to do 
so into the eighteenth century speaks volumes 
for the public opinion of its morals; and the 
scholar who knows the wealth of idiomatic foul- 
ness in the best plays of Shakespeare, luckily 
hidden from the layman in large measure, does 
not need to be told of the license and lewdness 
prevalent at the time. The Puritans are noted 
for their repressive attitude toward worldly 
pleasures and no doubt part of their antago- 
nism to tne playhouse was due to the general 
feeling that it is a sin to enjoy oneself, and 
that any institution which was thronged by so- 
ciety for avowed purposes of entertainment 
must derive from the devil. But documentary 
evidence exists to show that an institution 
which in England made possible the drama of 
Shakespeare, Beaumont and Fletcher, Web- 
ster, Ford, Jonson and Dekkar, \witings which 
we still point to with pride as our chief con- 
tribution to the creative literature of the 
world, could include abuses so flagrant as to 

60 



UP TO SHAKESPEARE 

call forth the stern denunciations of a Crom- 
well, and later even shock the decidedly easy 
standards of a Pepys. The religious element in 
society was, at intervals, to break out against 
the stage from pulpit or through the pen, in 
historical iteration of this early attitude; as 
with Collier in his famed attack upon its im- 
morality at the close of the seventeenth cen- 
tury, and numerous more modern diatribes 
from such clergymen as Spurgeon and Buck- 
ley. 

And in order to understand the peculiar re- 
lation of the respectable classes in America to 
the theater, it is necessary to realize that those 
cherishing this antipathy were our forefathers, 
the Puritan settlers. The attitude was inimi- 
cal, and of course the circumstances were all 
against a proper development of the function 
of the playhouse. Art and letters upon Ameri- 
can soil, forsooth, had to await their day in 
the seventeenth and following centuries, when 
our ancestors had to give their full strength 
to more utilitarian matters, or to the grave 
demands of the future life. The Anglo-Saxon 

61 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

notion that the theater is evil is to be traced 
directly to these historic causes ; and transplant- 
ed to so favorable a soil as America, it has pro- 
duced most unfortunate results in our dra- 
matic history, the worst of all being the gen- 
eral unenlightened view respecting the use and 
usufruct of an institution in its nature capable 
of so much good alike to the masses and the 
classes. 



62 



CHAPTER IV 

GROWTH TO THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 

T3REPAREDNESS in the appreciation 
-^ of a modern play presupposes a knowl- 
edge of the origin and early development of 
English drama, as briefly sketched in the pre- 
ceding pages. It also, and more obviously, 
involves some acquaintance with the master 
dramatists who led up to or flourished in the 
Elizabethan period, with Shakespeare as the 
central figure; it must, too, be cognizant of 
the gradual deterioration of the product in the 
post-Elizabethan time; of the temporary close 
of the public theaters under Puritan influence 
during the Commonwealth; and of the substi- 
tution for the mighty poetry of Shakespeare 
and his mates of the corrupt Restoration com- 
edy which was introduced into England with 
the return of the second Stuart to the throne 
in 1660. This brilliant though brutally inde- 

63 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

cent comedy of manners, with Congreve, 
Wycherley, Etherage, Vanbrugh and Farqu- 
har as chief playwrights, while it represents in 
literature the moral nadir of the polite section 
of English society, is of decided importance 
in our dramatic history, because it reflected the 
manners and morals of the time, and quite as 
much because it is conspicuous for skillful 
characterization, effective dialogue and a feel- 
ing for scene and situation — all elements in 
good dramaturgy. 

This intelligent attempt to know what lies 
historically behind present drama will also 
make itself aware of the falling away early in 
the eighteenth century, in favor of the new 
literary form, the Novel; and the all too brief 
flashing forth of another comedy of manners 
with Sheridan and Goldsmith, which retained 
the sparkle, wit and literary flavor of the Res- 
toration, with a later decency and a wholesomer 
social view; to be followed again by a well- 
nigh complete divorce of literature and the 
stage until well past the middle of the nine- 
teenth century, when began the gradual re- 

64 



r NINETEENTH CENTURY GROWTH 
birth of a drama which once more took on the 
quahty of letters and made a serious appeal as 
an esthetic art and a worthy interpretation of 
life : what may be called the modern school ini- 
tiated by Ibsen. 
All this interesting growth and wonderfully 
varied accomplishment may be but lightly 
touched upon here, for admirable studies of 
the different periods and schools by many 
scholars are at hand and the earnest theater 
student may be directed thereto for further 
reading. The work of Professor Schelling on 
Elizabethan drama is thorough and authorita- 
tive. The modern view of Shakespeare and 
his contribution (referred to in Chapter III) 
will be found in Professor Baker's Develop- 
ment of Shakespeare as a Dramatist and Pro- 
fessor Matthews' Shakespeare as a Play- 
wright, The general reader will find in The 
Mermaid Series of plays good critical treat- 
ment of the main Elizabethan and post-Eliza- 
bethan plays, together with the texts, so that 
a practical acquaintance with the product may 
be gained. The series also includes the Res- 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

toration dramas in their best examples. For 
the Sheridan- Goldsmith plays a convenient edi- 
tion is that in the Drama section of the Belles 
Lettres series of English Literature, where the 
representative plays of an author are printed 
with enlightening introductions and other criti- 
cal apparatus. In becoming familiar with 
these aids the reader will receive the necessary 
hints to a further acquaintance with the more 
technical books which study the earlier, more 
difficult part of dramatic evolution, and give 
attention to the complex story of the develop- 
ment of the theater as an institution. 

A few things stand out for special em- 
phasis here in regard to this developmental 
time. Let it be remembered that the story of 
English drama in its unfolding should be 
viewed in twin aspects ; the growth of the play 
under changing conditions; and the growth 
of the playhouse which makes it possible. 
What has been said already of the physical 
framework of the early English theater throws 
light at once, as we saw, upon the nature of 
the play. And in fact, throughout the devel- 

66 



NINETEENTH CENTURY GROWTH 

opment, the play has changed its form in di- 
rect relation to the change in the nature of the 
stage upon which the play has been presented. 
The older type is a stage suitable for the fine- 
languaged, boldly charactered, steadily pre- 
sented play of Shakespeare acted on a jutting 
platform where the individual actor inevitably 
is of more prominence, and so poorly lighted 
and scantily provided with scenery that words 
perforce and robustious effects of acting were 
necessitated, instead of the scenic appeals, sub- 
tler histrionism and plastic face and body work 
of the modern stage which has shrunk back to 
become a f ramed-in picture behind the prosce- 
nium arch. As the reader makes himself fa- 
miliar with Marlowe, who led on to Shake- 
speare, with the comedy and masque of Ben 
Jonson, with the romantic and social plays of 
Beaumont and Fletcher, the lurid tragic writ- 
ing of Webster, the softer tragedy of Ford 
and the rollicking folk comedy, pastoral poetry 
or serious social studies of Dekkar and Hey- 
wood, he will come to realize that on the one 
hand what he supposed to be the sole touch of 

67 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

Shakespeare in poetic expression was largely a 
general gift of the spacious days of Elizabeth, 
poetry, as it were, being in the very air men 
breathed*; and yet will recognize that the 
Stratford man walked commonly on the 
heights only now and again touched by the 
others. And as he reads further the plays of 
dramatists like Massinger, Tourneur, Shirley, 
and Otway he will find, along with gleams and 
glimpses of the grand manner, a steady degen- 
eration from high poetry and tragic serious- 
ness to rant, bombast, and the pseudo-poetry 
that is rhetoric, with the declension of tragedy 
into melodrama. High poetry gradually dis- 
integrates, and the way is prepared for the 
Restoration comedy. 

In reflecting upon the effect of a closing of 
the public theaters for nearly twenty years 
(1642-1660) the student will appreciate what 
a body blow this must have been to the true in- 
terests of the stage; and find in it at least a 
partial explanation of the rebound to the vig- 

*A fact humorously yet keenly suggested in Ber- 
nard Shaw's clever piece, The Dark Lady of the Sonnets. 

68 



I 



NINETEENTH CENTURY GROWTH 

orous indecencies of Congreve and his asso- 
ciates (Wycherley, Etherage, Vanbrugh, Far- 
quhar) when the ban was removed; human na- 
ture, pushed too far, ever expressing itself by 
reactions. 

The ineradicable and undeniable literary 
virtues of the Restoration writers and their 
technical advancement of the play as a form 
and a faithful mirror of one phase of English 
society will reconcile the investigator to a pic- 
ture of life in which every man is a rake or 
cuckold and every woman a light o' love; a 
sort of boudoir atmosphere that has a tainted 
perfume removing it far from the morning 
freshness of the Elizabethans. And conse- 
quently he will experience all the more grati- 
tude in reaching the eighteenth century plays : 
The School for Scandal, The Rivals, and She 
Stoops to Conquer, when they came a genera- 
tion later. While retaining the polish and the 
easy carriage of good society, these dramas 
got rid of the smut and the smirch, and added 
a flavor of hearty English fun and a saner con- 
ception of social life; a drama rooted firmly 

69 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

in the fidelities instead of the unfaithfulnesses 
of human character. These eighteenth century 
plays, like those of the Restoration — The Plain 
Dealer, The Way of the World, The Man of 
Mode, The Relapse, and The Beaux Strata- 
gem — were still played in the old-fashioned 
playhouses, like Drury Lane, or Covent Gar- 
den, with the stage protruding into the audi- 
torium and the classic architecture ill adapted 
to acoustics, and the boxes so arranged as to 
favor aristocratic occupants rather than in the 
interests of the play itself. The frequent 
change of scene, the five-act division of form, 
the prologue and epilogue and the free use of 
such devices as the soliloquy and aside remind 
us of the subsequent advance in technic. 
These marks of a by-gone fashion we are glad 
to overlook or accept, in view of the essential 
dramatic values and permanent contribution 
to letters which Sheridan and Goldsmith made 
to English comedy. But at the same time it is 
only conmion sense to felicitate ourselves that 
these methods of the past have been outgrown, 
and better methods substituted. And we shall 

70 



NINETEENTH CENTURY GROWTH 

never appreciate eighteenth century play-mak- 
ing to the full until we understand that the au- 
thors wrote in protest against a sickly sort of 
unnatural sentimentality, mawkish and untrue 
to life, which had become fashionable on the 
English stage in the hands of Foote, Colman 
and others. Sheridan brought back common 
sense and Goldsmith dared to introduce "low" 
characters and laughed out of acceptance the 
conventional separation of the socially high 
and humble in English life. His preface to The 
Good Natured Man will be found instructive 
reading in relation to this service. 

From 1775 to 1860 the Enghsh stage, looked 
back upon from the vantage point of our time, 
appears empty, indeed. It did not look so 
barren, we may believe, to contemporaries. 
Shakespeare was doctored to suit a false taste ; 
so great an actor-manager as Garrick com- 
placently playing in a version of Lear in which 
the ruined king does not die and Cordelia mar- 
ries Edgar ; an incredible prettification and fal- 
sification of the mighty tragedy! Jonson 
writes for the stage, though the last man who 

71 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

should have done so. Sheridan Knowles, in 
the early nineteenth century, gives us Virgin- 
ius, which is still occasionally heard, persisting 
because of a certain vigor and effectiveness of 
characterization, though hopelessly old-fash- 
ioned in its rhetoric and its formal obeyance 
of outworn conventions, both artistic and intel- 
lectual. The same author's The Honeymoon 
is also preserved for us through possessing a 
good part for the accomplished actress. Later 
Bulwer, whose feeling for the stage cannot be 
denied, in Money, Richelieu, and The Lady of 
Lyons, shows how a certain gift for the the- 
atrical, coupled with less critical standards, will 
combine to preserve dramas whose defects are 
now only too apparent. 
P^ As the nineteenth century advances the 
fiction of Reade and Dickens is often fitted 
to the boards and the fact that the latter was 
a natural theater man gave and still gives his 
product a frequent hearing on the stage. To 
meet the beloved characters of this most widely 
read of all English fictionists is in itself a 
pleasure sufficient to command generous au- 

1% 



NINETEENTH CENTURY GROWTH 

diences. Boucicault's London Assurance is 
good stage material rather than literature. 
Tom Taylor produced among many stage 
pieces a few of distinct merit; his New Men 
and Old Acres is still heard, in the hands of 
experimental amateurs, and reveals sterling 
qualities of characterization and structure. 

But the fact remains, hardly modified by 
the sporadic manifestations, that the English 
stage was frankly separating itself from Eng- 
lish literature, and by 1860 the divorce was 
practically complete. There was a wof ul lack 
of public consideration for its higher interests 
on the one hand, and no definite artistic en- 
deavor to produce worthy stage literature on 
the other. Authors who wrote for the stage 
got no encouragement to print their dramas 
and so make the literary appeal; there was 
among them no esprit de corps, binding them 
together for a self-conscious effort to make 
the theater a place where literature throve and 
art maintained its sovereignty. No leading or 
representative writers were dramatists first of 
all. If such wrote plays, they did it half heart- 

73 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

edly, and as an exercise rather than a practical 
aim. It is curious to ask ourselves if this fall- 
ing away of the stage might not have been 
checked had Dickens given himself more defi- 
nitely to dramatic writing. His bias in that 
direction is well known. He wrote plays in his 
younger days and was throughout his life a 
fine amateur actor: the dramatic and often 
theatric character of his fiction is familiar. It 
was his intention as a youth to go on the stage. 
But he chose the novel and perhaps in so do- 
ing depleted dramatic history. 

Literature and the stage, then, had at the 
best a mere bowing acquaintance. Browning, 
who under right conditions of encouragement 
might have trained himself to be a theater poet, 
was chagrined by his experience with The Blot 
on the 'Scutcheon and thereafter wrote closet 
plays rather than acting drama. Swinburne, 
master of music and mage of imagination, was 
in no sense a practical dramatist. Shelley's 
dramas are also for book reading rather than 
stage presentation, in spite of the fact that his 
Cenci has theater possibilities to make one re- 

74 



NINETEENTH CENTURY GROWTH 

gret all the more his lack of stage knowledge 
and aim. Bailey's Festus is not an acting play, 
though it was acted; the sporadic drama, in fact, 
between 1850 and 1870, light or serious, was 
frankly literary in the academic sense and not 
adapted to stage needs; or else consisted of 
book dramatizations from Reade and Dickens; 
or simply represented the journeymen work of 
prolific authors with little or no claim to liter- 
ary pretensions. 

The practical proof of all this can be found 
in the absence of drama of the period in book 
form, except for the acting versions, badly 
printed and cheaply bound, which did not make 
the literary appeal at all. Where to-day our 
leading dramatists pubhsh their work as a mat- 
ter of course, offering it as they would fiction 
or any other form of literature, the reading 
public of the middle century neither expected 
nor received plays as part of their mental pabu- 
lum, and an element in the contemporary let- 
ters. The drama had not only ceased to be a 
recognized section of current literature, but 
was also no longer an expression of national 

75 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

life. The first faint gleam of better things 
came when T. W. Robertson's genteel light 
comedies began to be produced at the Court 
Theater in 1868. As we read or see Caste or 
Society to-day they seem somewhat flimsy ma- 
terial, to speak the truth; and their technic, 
after the rapid development of a generation, 
has a mechanical creak for trained ears. But 
we must take them at the psychologic moment 
of their appearance, and recognize that they 
were a very great advance on what had gone 
before. They brought contemporary social life 
upon the stage as did Congreve in 1680, Sheri- 
dan in 1765 ; and they made that life interest- 
ing to large numbers of theater-goers who 
hitherto had abstained from play acting. And 
so Caste and its companion plays, of which it 
is the best, drew crowded houses and the stage 
became once more an amusement to reckon 
with in polite circles. The royal box was once 
more occupied, the playhouse became fashion- 
able, no longer quite negligible as a form of 
art. To be sure, this was a town drama, and 
for the upper classes, as was the Restoration 

76 



NINETEENTH CENTURY GROWTH 

Comedy and that of the eighteenth century. 
It was not a people's theater, the Theater Rob- 
ertson, but it had the prime merit of a more 
truthful representation of certain phases of the 
life of its day. And hence Robertson will al- 
ways be treated as a figure of some historical 
importance in the British drama, though not a 
great dramatist. 

In the eighteen eighties another influence be- 
gan to be felt, that of Ibsen. The great drama- 
tist from the North was made known to Eng- 
lish readers by the criticism and translations 
of Gosse and Archer ; and versions of his plays 
were given, tentatively and occasionally, in 
England, as in other lands. Thus readers and 
audiences alike gradually came to get a sense 
of a new force in the theater : an uncompromis- 
ingly truthful, stern portrayal of modern so- 
cial conditions, the story told with consummate 
craftsmanship, and the national note sounding 
beneath the apparent pessimism. Here were, 
it was evident, new material, new method and 
a new insistence upon intellectual values in the 
theater. It can now be seen plainly enough 

77 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

that Ibsen's influence upon the drama of the 
nineteenth century is commensurate in revolu- 
tionary results with that of Shakespeare in the 
sixteenth. He gave the play a new and im- 
proved formula for play- writing ; and he 
showed that the theater could be used as an 
arena for the discussion of vital questions of 
the day. Even in France, the one country 
where dramatic development has been steadily 
important for nearly three centuries, his in- 
fluence has been considerable; in other Euro- 
pean lands, as in England, his genius has been 
a pervasive force. Whether he will or no, the 
typical modern dramatist is a son of Ibsen, 
in that he has adopted the Norwegian's tech- 
nic and taken the function of playwright 
more seriously than before. 

Both with regard to intellectual values and 
technic, then, it is no exaggeration to speak of 
the modern drama, although it be an expression 
of the spirit of the time in reflecting social evo- 
lution, as bearing the special hallmark of Ib- 
sen's influence. A word follows on the varied 

and vital accomplishment of the present period. 

78 



CHAPTER V 

THE MODERN SCHOOL 

T ^ 7E have noted that Ibsen's plays began 
^ ^ to get a hearing in England in the 
eighteen nineties. In fact, it was in 1889 that 
Mr. J. T. Grein had the temerity to produce 
at his Independent Theater in London A DolVs 
HousCj and followed it shortly afterward by 
the more drastic Ghosts, The influence in 
arousing an interest in and knowledge of a 
kind of drama which entered the arena for the 
purpose of social challenge and serious satiric 
attack was incalculable. Both Jones and 
Pinero, honorable pioneers in the making of 
the new English drama, and still actively en- 
gaged in their profession, had begun to write 
plays some years before this date; but it may 
be believed that the example of Ibsen, if not 
originating their impulse, was part of the en- 
couragement to let their own work reflect more 

79 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

truthfully the social time spirit and to study 
modern character types with closer observation, 
allowing" their stories to be shaped not so much 
by theatric convention as by honest psychologic 
necessity. 

Jones began with melodrama, of which The 
Silver King {1SS2) , Saints and Sinners (1884) 
and The Middle Man (1889) are examples; 
Pinero with ingenious farces happily associated 
with the fortunes of Sir Squire Bancroft and 
his wife, The Magistrate (1885) being an ex- 
cellent illustration of the type. The dates are 
significant in showing the turning of these 
skillful playwrights to play -making that was 
more serious in the handling of life and more 
artistic in constructive values; they are prac- 
tically synchronous with the introduction of 
Ibsen into England. Both authors have 
now long lists of plays to their credit, with 
acknowledged masterpieces among them. 
Pinero's earlier romantic style may be seen 
in the enormously successful Sweet Laven- 
der^ a style repeated ten years later in 
Trelawney of the Wells; his more mature man- 
so 



THE MODERN SCHOOL 

ner being represented in The Second Mrs. 
Tanqueray, the best of a number of plays 
which center in the woman who is a social rebel, 
the dramatist's tone being almost austerely 
grim in carrying the study to its logical con- 
clusion. For a time Sir Arthur seemed to be 
preoccupied with the soiled dove as dramatic 
inspiration; but so fine a recent play as The 
Thunderbolt shows he can get away from it. 
Jones' latest and best work as well has a ten- 
dency to the serious satiric showing-up of the 
failings of prosperous middle-class English so- 
ciety; this, however, in the main, kept in abey- 
ance to story interest and constructive skill in 
its handling : Mrs, Dane's Defense ^ The Case 
of Rebellious Susan, The Liars, The Rogue's 
Comedy, The Hypocrites, and Michael and 
His Lost Angel stand for admirably able per- 
formances in different ways. 

At the time when these two dramatists were 
beginning to produce work that was to change 
the English theater Bernard Shaw, after writ- 
ing several pieces of fiction, had begun to give 
his attention to plays so advanced in technic 

81 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

and teaching that he was forced to wait more 
than a decade to get a wide hearing in the thea- 
ter. His debt to the Norwegian has been hand- 
somely acknowledged by the Irish dramatist, 
wit and philosopher who was to become the 
most striking phenomenon of the English thea- 
ter: with all the differences, an English Ibsen. 
A little later, in the early eighteen nineties, 
another brilliant Irishman, Oscar Wilde, wrote 
a number of social comedies whose playing 
value to-day testifies to his gift in telling a 
stage story, while his epigrammatic wit and 
literary polish gave them the literary excellence 
likely to perpetuate his name. For the com- 
edy of manners, Hght, easy, elegant, keen, and 
with satiric point in its reflection of society, 
nothing of the time surpasses such dramas as 
Lady Windermere's Fan and A Woman of No 
Importance. The author's farce — farce, yet 
more than farce in dialogue and characteriza- 
tion — The Importance of Being Earnest, is 
also a genuine contribution in its kind. And 
the strange, somber, intensely poetic Salome is 
a remarkable tour de force in an unusual field. 



THE MODERN SCHOOL 

The tendency to turn from fiction to the 
drama as another form of story telling fast 
coming into vogue is strikingly set forth and 
embellished in the case of Sir James Barrie, 
who, after many successes in novel and short 
story, became a dramatist some twenty years 
ago and is now one of the few men of genius 
writing for the stage. His Peter Pan, The 
Little Minister, The Admirable Crichton, and 
What Every Woman Knows are four of over 
a dozen dramas which have given him world 
fame. Uniquely, among English writers 
whose work is of unquestionable literary qual- 
ity, he refrains from the publication of plays; 
a very regrettable matter to countless who ap- 
preciate his rare quality. He is in his droll way 
of whimsy a social critic beneath the irrespon- 
sible play of a poet's fancy and an idealist's 
vision. His keen yet gentle interpretations of 
character are solidly based on truth to the ever- 
lasting human traits, and his poetry is all the 
better for its foundation of sanity and its salt 
of wit. One has an impulse to call him the 
Puck of the English theater; then feels com- 

83 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

pelled to add a word which recognizes the lov- 
ing wisdom mingling with the pagan charm. 
Sir James is as unusual in his way as 
Shaw in his. Of late he has shown an 
inclination to write brief, one-act pieces, there- 
by adding to our interest in a form of drama 
evidently just beginning to come into greater 
regard. 

For daring originality both of form and 
content Bernard Shaw is easily the first living 
dramatist of England. He is a true son of 
Ibsen, in that he insists on thinking in the thea- 
ter, as well as in the experimental nature of 
his technic, which has led him to shape for him- 
self the drama of character and thesis he has 
chosen to write. To the thousands who know 
his name through newspaper publicity or the 
vogue of some piece of his in the playhouse, 
Shaw is simply a witty Irishman, dealer in 
paradox and wielder of a shillelah swung to 
break the heads of Philistines for the sheer 
Celtic love of a row. To the few, however, an 
honorable minority now rapidly increasing, he 
is a deeply earnest, constructive social student 

84. 



THE MODERN SCHOOL 

and philosopher, who uses a popular amuse- 
ment as a vehicle for the wider dissemination 
of perfectly serious views : a socialist, a mystic 
who believes in the Life Force sweeping man 
on (if man but will) to a high destiny, and a 
lover of fellow man who in his own words re- 
gards his life as belonging to the conmiunity 
and wishes to serve it, in order that he may be 
"thoroughly used up" when he comes to die. 
He has conquered as a playwright because be- 
neath the sparkling sally, the startling juxta- 
position of character and the apparent irrever- 
ence there hides a genuinely religious nature. 
Shaw shows himself an "immoralist" only in 
the sense that he attacks jejune, vicious pseudo- 
morals now existent. For sheer acting values 
in the particulars of dialogue, character, scenic 
effectiveness, feeling for climax and unity of 
aim such plays as Candida, Arms and the Man, 
Captain Brasshound's Profession, The Devil's 
Disciple, John BulVs Other Island, Man and 
Superman, The Showing Up of Blanco Pos- 
nett, and others yet, are additions to the serious 
comedy of England likely to be of lasting lus- 

85 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

ter, so far as contemporary vision can pene- 
trate. 

One of the most interesting developments of 
recent years has been the Irish theater move- 
ment, in itself part of the general rehabilita- 
tion of the higher imaginative life of that re- 
markable people. The drama of the gentle 
idealist poet Yeats, of the shrewdly observant 
Lady Gregory and of the grimly realistic yet 
richly romantic Synge has carried far beyond 
their little country, so that plays like Yeats' 
The Land of Heart's Desire and The Hour 
Glass, Lady Gregory's Spreading the News 
and Synge's Riders to the Sea and The Play- 
hoy of the Western World are heard wherever 
the English language is understood, this stage 
literature being aided in its travels by the ex- 
cellent companjr of Irish Players founded to 
exploit it and giving the world a fine example 
of the success that may come from a single- 
eyed devotion to an ideal: namely, the pres- 
entation for its own sake of the simple typical 
native life of the land. 

It should be remembered that while these 
86 



THE MODERN SCHOOL 

three leaders are best known, half a dozen other 
able Irish dramatists are associated with them, 
and doing much to interpret the farmer or city 
folk: writers like Mayne, Boyle, McComas, 
Murray, and Robinson. 

Under the stimulus of Shaw in his reaction 
against the machine-made piece and the tire- 
some reiteration of sex motives, there has 
sprung up a younger school which has striven 
to introduce more varied subject-matter and a 
broader view, also greater truth and subtler 
methods in play-making. Here belong Gran- 
ville Barker, with his Voysey Inheritance (his 
best piece), noteworthy also as actor-manager 
and producer; the novelists, Galsworthy and 
Bennett; and Masefield, whose Tragedy of 
Nan contains imaginative poetry mingled with 
melodrama; and still later figures, conspicu- 
ous among them the late Stanley Houghton, 
whose Hindle Wakes won critical and popular 
praise ; others being McDonald Hastings with 
The New Sin; Githa Sowerby, author of the 
grim, effective play, Rutherford and Son; 
Elizabeth Baker, with Chains to her credit; 

87 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

Wilfred Gibson, who writes brief poignant 
studies of east London in verse that in form 
is daringly realistic; Cosmo Hamilton, who 
made us think in his attractive The Blindness 
of Virtue; and J. O. Francis, whose Welsh 
play. Change, was recognized as doing for that 
country the same service as the group led by 
Yeats and Synge has performed for Ireland. 

A later Synge seems to have arisen in Lord 
Dunsany, whose dramas in book form have 
challenged admiration; and since his early 
death St. John Hankin's dramatic work is com- 
ing into importance as a masterly contribution 
to light comedy, the sort of drama that, after 
the Wilde fashion, laughs at folly, satirizes 
weakness, refrains from taking sides, and never 
forgets that the theater should oif er amuse- 
ment. 

Of all these playwrights, rising or risen, who 
have got a hearing after the veterans first men- 
tioned, Galsworthy seems most significant for 
the profound social earnestness of his thought, 
the great dignity of his art and the fact that 
he rarely fails to respect the stage demand for 

88 



THE MODERN SCHOOL 

objective interest and story appeal. Some of 
these new dramatists go too far in rejecting 
almost scornfully the legitimate theater mood 
of amusement and the necessity of a method 
differing from the more analytic way of fic- 
tion. Mr. Galsworthy, however, though severe 
to austerity in his conceptions and nothing if 
not serious in treatment, certainly puts upon 
us something of the compelling grip of the 
true dramatist in such plays as The Silver Box, 
Strife and, strongest of them all and one of 
the finest examples of modern tragedy. Jus- 
tice, where the themes are so handled as to in- 
crease their intrinsic value. This able and high- 
aiming novelist, when he turns to another tech- 
nic, takes the trouble to acquire it and becomes 
a stage influence to reckon with. The Pigeon, 
the most genial outcome of his dramatic art, 
is a delightful play : and The Eldest Son, The 
Fugitive and The Mob, if none of them have 
been stage successes, stand for work of praise- 
worthy strength. 

On the side of poetry, and coming a little 
before the Irish drama attracted general atten- 

89 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

tion, Stephen Phillips proved that a poet could 
learn the technic of the theater and satisfy the 
demands of reader and play-goer. Saturated 
with literary traditions, frankly turning to his- 
tory, legend, and literature itself for his in- 
spiration, Mr. Phillips has written a number of 
acting dramas, all of them possessing stage 
value, while remaining real poetry. His best 
things are Paolo and Francesca and Herod, the 
former a play of lovely lyric quality and gen- 
uinely dramatic moments of .suspense and 
chmax; the latter a powerful handling of the 
Bible* motive. Very fine too in its central char- 
acter is Nero; and Ulysses, while less suited to 
the stage, where it seems spectacle rather than 
drama, is filled with noble poetry and has a last 
act that is a little play in itself. Several of Mr. 
Phillips' best plays have been elaborately 
staged and successfully produced by repre- 
sentative actor-managers like Sir Herbert 
Beerbohm Tree and Sir George Alexander. 

Still with poetry in mind, it may be added 
that Lawrence Binyon has given evidence of 
distinct power in dramatic poetry in his Attila, 

90 



THE MODERN SCHOOL 

and the delicate Pierrot play, Prunella, by 
Messrs. Housman and Granville Barker is a 
success in quite another genre. 

Israel Zangwill has turned, like Barrie, Gals- 
worthy and Bennett, from fiction to the play, 
and The Children of the Ghetto, Merely Mary 
Ann, The Melting Pot, The War God and The 
Next Religion show progressively a firmer 
technic and the use of larger themes. Other 
playwrights like Alfred Sutro, Sidney Grundy, 
W. S. Maugham, Hubert Davies, and Captain 
Marshall have a skillful hand, and in the cases 
of Maugham and Davies, especially the latter, 
clever social satire has come from their pens. 
Louis R. Parker has shown his range and skill 
in successful dramas so widely divergent as 
Rosemary, Pomander Walk and Disraeli, 

It may be seen from this category, sugges- 
tive rather than complete, that there is in Eng- 
land ample evidence for the statement that 
drama is now being vigorously produced and 
must be reckoned with as an appreciable and 
welcome part of contemporary letters. In 
the United States, so far, the showing is 

91 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

slighter and less impressive. Yet it is within 
the facts to say that the native play-making 
has waxed more serious-minded and skillful 
(this especially in the last few years) and so 
has become a definite adjunct to the general 
movement toward the reinvestiture of drama. 

In the prose drama which attempts honestly 
to reproduce American social conditions, elder 
men like Howard and Heme, and later ones 
like Thomas, Gillette and Clyde Fitch, have 
done worthy pioneer work. Among niany 
younger playwrights who are fast pressing to 
the front, Eugene Walter, who in The Easiest 
Way wrote one of the best realistic plays of 
the day, Edward Sheldon, with a dozen inter- 
esting dramas to his credit, notably The Nigger 
and Romance; and William Vaughan Moody, 
whose material in both The Great Divide and 
The Faith Healer is healthfully American and 
truthful, although the handling is romantic and 
that of the poet, deserve first mention. 

Women are increasingly prominent in this 
recent activity and in such hands as those of 
Rachel Crothers, Ann Flexner, Marguerite 

92 



THE MODERN SCHOOL 

Merrington, Margaret Mayo and Eleanor 
Gates our social life is likely to be exploited 
in a way to hint at its problems, and truthfully 
and amusingly set forth its types. 

Moody, though he wrote his stage plays in 
prose, was essentially the poet in viewpoint and 
imagination. A poet too, despite the fact that 
more than half his work is in prose, is Percy 
Mackaye, the son of a distinguished earlier 
playwright and theater reformer, author of 
Hazel Kirke and Paul Kauvar, Mr. Mac- 
kaye's prose comedy Mater ^ high comedy in the 
best sense, and his satiric burlesque, Anti-Mat- 
rimony, together with the thoughtful drama 
Tomorrow, which seeks to incorporate the new 
conception of eugenics in a vital story of the 
day, are good examples of one aspect of his 
work; and Jeanne d'Arc, Sapho and Phaon, 
verse plays, and the romantic spectacle play, A 
Thousand Years Ago, illustrate his poetic en- 
deavor. Taking a hint from a short story by 
Hawthorne, he has written in The Scarecrow 
one of the strongest and noblest serious dramas 
yet wrought by an American. He has also 

93 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

done much for the pageant and outdoor 
masque, as his The Canterbury Pilgrims, Sanc- 
tuary and St, Louis, A Civic Masque, pre- 
sented in May of 1914 on an heroic scale in 
that city, testify. A poet, whether in lyric or 
dramatic expression, is Josephine Preston Pea- 
body. Her lovely reshaping of the familiar 
legend known best in the hands of Browning, 
The Piper, took the prize at the Stratford 
on Avon spring Shakespeare festival some 
years ago, and has been successful since both 
in England and America. Her other dramatic 
writing has not as yet met so well the stage de- 
mands, but is conspicuous for charm and 
ideality. 

In the imaginative field of romance, poetry 
and allegory we may also place the American- 
ized Englishman, Charles Rann Kennedy, who 
has put the touch of the poet and prophet upon 
homely modern material. His beautiful moral- 
ity play. The Servant in the House, secured his 
reputation and later plays from The Winter 
Feast to The Idol Breaker, inclusive of several 
shorter pieces, the one act form being definitely 

94 



THE MODERN SCHOOL 

practiced by this author, have been interesting 
work, skillful of technic and surcharged with 
social sympathy and significance. Edward 
Knoblauch, the author of The Faun, of Mile- 
stones in collaboration with Mr. Bennett, and 
of the fantastic oriental divertissement, Kis- 
met; and Austin Strong, who wrote The Toy- 
maker of Nuremberg, are among the younger 
dramatists from whom much may yet be ex- 
pected. 

In this enumeration, all too scant to do jus- 
tice to newer drama in the United States, espe- 
cially in the field of realistic satire and humor- 
ous perception of the large-scaled clashes of 
our social life, it must be understood that I 
perforce omit to mention fully two score able 
and earnest young workers who are showing 
a most creditable desire to depict American 
conditions and have learned, or are rapidly 
learning, the use of their stage tools. The pur- 
pose here is to name enough of personal accom- 
plishment to buttress the claim that a promis- 
ing school has arisen on the native soil with 
aims and methods similar to those abroad. 

95 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

And all this work, English or American, 
shows certain ear-marks to bind it together 
and declare it of our day in comparison 
with the past. What are these distinctive fea- 
tures ? 

On the side of technic, a greater and greater 
insistence on telling the storj^ dramatically, 
with more of truth, to the exclusion of all that 
is non-dramatic, although preserved in the con- 
ventions of the theater for perhaps centuries; 
the elimination of sub-plot and of subsidiary 
characters which were of old deemed necessary 
for purposes of exposition; the avoidance of 
the prologue and such ancient and useful de- 
vices as the aside and the soliloquy; and such 
simplification of form that the typical play 
shall reduce itself most likely to three acts, and 
is almost always less than five ; a play that often 
has but one scene where the action is com- 
pressed within the time limits of a few hours, 
or, at the most, a day or two. All this is the 
outcome of the influence of Ibsen with its sub- 
tlety, expository methods and its intenser psy- 
chology. In word, dress, action and scene, too, 

96 



THE MODERN SCHOOL 

this modern type of drama approximates closer 
to life ; and inclines to minimize scenery save as 
congruous background, thus implying a dis- 
tinct rebellion from the stupidly literal scenic 
envisagement for which the influence of a Be- 
lasco is responsible. The new technic also has, 
in its seeking for an effect of verisimilitude, 
adopted the naturalistic key of life in its acting 
values and has built small theaters better 
adapted to this quieter, more penetrating pre- 
sentation. 

In regard to subject matter, and the author's 
attitude to his work, a marked tendency may 
be seen to emphasize personality in the charac- 
ter drawing, to make it of central interest (con- 
trasted with plot) and a bold attempt to pre- 
sent it in the more minute variations of motive 
and act rather than in those more obvious reac- 
tions to life which have hitherto characterized 
stage treatment ; and equally noticeable if not 
the dominant note of this latter-day drama, has 
been the social sympathy expressed in it and 
making it fairly resonant with kindly human 
values: the author's desire to see justice done to 

97 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

the under-dog" in the social struggle ; to extend 
a fraternal hand to the derelicts of the earth, 
to understand the poor and strive to help those 
who are weak or lost; all the underlings and 
incompetents and ill-doers of earth find their 
explainers and defenders in these writers. This 
is the note which sounds in the f raternalism of 
Kennedy's The Servant in the House, the ar- 
raignment of society in Walter's The Easiest 
Way and Paterson's Rebellion, the contrast of 
the ideals of east and west in Moody's The 
Great Divide, and the democratic fellowship of 
Sheldon's Salvation Nell. It is the note abroad 
which gives meaning to Hauptmann's The 
Weavers, Galsworthy's Justice and Wede- 
kind's The Awakening of Spring, different as 
they are from each other. It stands for a tol- 
erant, even loving comprehension of the other 
fellow's case. There is in it a belief in the age, 
too, and in modern man ; a faith in democracy 
and an aspiration to see established on the earth 
a social condition which will make democracy 
a fact, not merely a convenient political catch- 
word. 

98 



THE MODERN SCHOOL 

Some authors, in their obsession with truth 
on the stage, have too much neglected the fun- 
damental demands of the theater and so sac- 
rificed the crisp crescendo treatment of crisis in 
climax as to indulge in a tame, undramatic and 
bafflingly subtle manipulation of the story; a 
remark applicable, for example, to a writer like 
Granville Barker. 

But the growth and gains in both coimtries, 
with America modestly second, are encourag- 
ing. In these modern hands the play has been 
simplified, deepened, made more truthful, more 
sympathetic; and is now being given the ex- 
pressional form that means literature. The 
bad, the cheap, the flimsy are still being pro- 
duced, of course, in plenty; so has it always 
been, so ever will be. But the drama that is 
worthy, skillful, refreshing in these different 
kinds — farce, comedy light, polite, or satiric; 
broad comedy or high, melodrama, tragedy, 
romance and morality — is now offered, steadily, 
generously, and it depends upon the theater- 
goer who has trained himself to know, to re- 
ject and accept rightly, to appreciate and so 

99 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

make secure the life of all drama that is worth 
preservation. 

This survey of the English theater and the 
drama which has been produced in it from the 
beginning — a survey the brevity of which will 
not detract, it may be hoped, from its clear- 
ness, may serve to place our play-goer in a 
position the better to appreciate the present 
conditions ; and to give him more respect for a 
form of literature which he turns to to-day for 
intelligent recreation, deeming it a helpfully 
stimulating form of art. From this vantage- 
point, he may now approach a consideration of 
the drama as an artistic problem. He will be 
readier than before, perhaps, to realize that the 
playwright, with this history behind him, is the 
creature of a long and important development, 
in a double sense : in his treatment of hf e, and 
in the manner of that treatment. 

Naturally, the theater-goer will not stop with 
the English product. The necessity alone of 
understanding Ibsen, as the main figure in this 
complex modern movement, will lead him to a 

100 



THE MODERN SCHOOL 

study of the author of A Doll's House. And, 
working from center to circumference, he will 
with ever increasing stimulation and delight be- 
come familiar with many other foreign dram- 
atists of national or international importance. 
He will give attention to those other Scandi- 
navians, Strindberg, Drachman and Bjornson; 
to the Russians, Tolstoy, Tchekoff and Gorky ; 
to Frenchmen like Rostand and Maeterlinck, 
Becque, Hervieu, Lavedan, Donnay and 
Brieux ; to the Germans and Austrians, Haupt- 
mann, Sudermann, Wedekind, Hofmansthal 
and Schnitzler; to the Italian, D'Annimzio, and 
the Spanish Echgeragay, — ^to mention but a 
few. It may even be that, once aroused to the 
value of the expression of the Present in these 
representative writers for the stage, he will 
wish to trace the dramatic history behind them 
in their respective countries, as he has (sup- 
posedly) already done with the dramatists of 
his own tongue. If he do so, the play-goer 
will surely add greatly not only to his general 
literary culture but to his power of true appre- 
ciation of the play of the moment he may be 

101 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

witnessing. For all this reading and reflection 
and comparison will tend to make him a critic- 
in-the-seat who settles the fate of plays to-day 
because he knows the plays of yesterday and 
yesteryear. 



102 



CHAPTER VI 

THE PLAY AS THEME AND PERSONAL VIEW 

T 71 7E may now come directly to a consid- 
^ ^ eration of the play regarded as a work 
of art and a piece of life. After all, this is the 
central aim in the attempt to become intelligent 
in our play-going. A play may properly be 
thought of as a theme; it has a definite subject, 
which involves a personal opinion about life on 
the author's part; a view of human beings in 
their complex interrelations the sum of which 
make up man's existence on this globe. 

The play has a story, of course, and that 
story is so handled as to constitute a plot : mean- 
ing a tangle of circumstances in which the fates 
of a handful of human beings are involved, a 
tangle to which it is the business of the plot 
to give meaning and direction. But back of the 
story, in any drama that rises to some worth, 
there is a theme, in a sense. Thus, the theme 

103 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

of Macbeth is the degenerating eiFect of sin 
upon the natures of the king and his spouse; 
and the theme of Ibsen's A DolVs House is the 
evil results of treating a grown-up woman as if 
she were a mere puppet with little or no rela- 
tion to life's serious realities. 

The thing that gives dignity and value to 
any play is to be found just here: a distinc- 
tive theme, which is over and above the interest 
of story-plot, sinks into the consciousness of the 
spectator or reader, and gives him stimulating 
thoughts about life and living long after he 
may have quite forgotten the fable which made 
the framework for this suggestive impulse of 
the dramatist. Give the statement a practical 
test. Plenty of plays suffice well enough per- 
haps to fill an evening pleasantly, yet have no 
theme at all, no idea which one can take with 
him from the playhouse and ruminate at leisure. 
For, although the story may be skillfully han- 
dled and the technic of the piece be satisfying, 
if it is not ah out anything, the rational auditor 
is vaguely dissatisfied and finds in the final 
estimate that all such plays fall below those that 

104 



THE PLAY AS THEME 

really have a theme. To illustrate : Mr. Augus- 
tus Thomas's fine play, The Witching Hour, 
has a theme embedded in a good, old-fashioned 
melodramatic story; and this is one of the rea- 
sons for its great success. But the same au- 
thor's Mrs. LeffingwelVs Boots, though exe- 
cuted with practiced skill, has no theme at all 
and therefore is at the best an empty, if amus- 
ing, trifle, far below the dramatist's full powers. 
Frankly, it is a pot boiler. And, similarly, Mr. 
Thomas's capital western American drama, 
Arizona, while primarily and apparently story 
for its own sake, takes on an added virtue be- 
cause it illustrates, in a story-setting, certain 
typical and worthy American traits to be found 
at the time and under those conditions in the far 
west. To have a theme is not to be didactic, 
neither to argue for a thesis nor moot a prob- 
lem. It is simply to have an opinion about life 
involved in and rising naturally out of the 
story, and never, never lugged in by the heels. 
The true dramatist does not tell a story be- 
cause he has a theme he wishes to impose upon 
the audience ; on the contrary, he tells his story 

105 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

because he sees life that way, in terms of plot, 
of drama, and in its course, and in spite of him- 
self, a certain notion or view about sublunary 
things enters into the structure of the whole cre- 
ation, and emanates from it like an atmosphere. 
One of the very best comedies of modern times 
is the late Sidney Grundy's A Pair of Spec- 
tacles, It has sound technic, delightful charac- 
terization, and a simple, plausible, coherent and 
interesting fable. But, beyond this, it has a 
theme, a heart-warming one: namely, that one 
who sees life through the kindly lenses of the 
optimist is not only happier, but gets the best 
results from his fellow beings; in short, is 
nearer the truth. And no one should doubt 
that this theme goes far toward explaining 
the remarkable vogue of this admirable com- 
edy. Without a theme so clear, agreeable and 
interpretive, a play equally skillful would 
never have had like fortune. 

And this theme in a play, as was hinted, 
must, to be acceptable, express the author's per- 
sonal opinion, honestly, fearlessly put forth. 
If it be merely what he ought to think in the 

106 



THE PLAY AS THEME 

premises, what others conventionally think, 
what it will, in his opinion, or that of the 
producer of the play, pay to think, the drama 
will not ring true, and will be likely to fail, 
even if the technic of a lifetime bolster it up. 
It must embody a truth relative to the writer, 
a fact about life as he sees it, and nothing else. 
A theme in a play cannot be abstract truth, for 
to tell us of abstract truth is the metier of the 
philosopher, and herein lies his difference from 
the stage story-teller. Relative truth is the 
play-maker's aim and the paramount demand 
upon him is that he be sincere. He must give 
a view of life in his story which is an honest 
statement of what human beings and human 
happenings really are in his experience. If his 
experience has been so peculiar or unique as 
to make his themes absurd and impossible to 
people in general, then his play will pretty 
surely fail. He pays the penalty of his 
warped, or too limited or degenerate ex- 
perience. No matter : show the thing as he sees 
it and knows it, that he must ; and then take his 
chances. 

107 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

And so convincing, so winning is sincerity, 
that even when the view that lies at the heart of 
the theme appears monstrous and out of all be- 
lief, yet it will stand a better chance of accept- 
ance than if the author had trimmed his sails to 
every wind of favor that blows. 

Mr. Kennedy wrote an odd drama a few 
years ago called The Servant in the House, in 
which he did a most unconventional thing in the 
way of introducing a mystic stranger out of 
the East into the midst of an ordinary mundane 
English household. Anybody examining such 
a play in advance, and aware of what sort of 
drama was typical of our day, might have been 
forgiven had he absolutely refused to have 
faith in such a work. But the author was one 
person who did have faith in it ; he had a fine 
theme : the idea that the Christ ideal, when pro- 
jected into daily life — instead of cried up once 
a week in church — and there acted on, is effica- 
cious. He had an unshaken belief in this idea. 
And he conquered, because he dared to substi- 
tute for the conventional and supposed inevi- 
table demand an apparently unpopular per- 

108 



THE PLAY AS THEME 

sonal conviction. He found, as men who dare 
commonly do, that the assumed personal view 
was the general view which no one had had the 
courage before to express. 

In the same way, M. Maeterlinck, another 
ideahst of the day, wrote The Blue Bird. It is 
safe to say that those in a position to be wise 
in matters dramatic would never have pre- 
dicted the enormous success of this simple child 
play in various countries. But the writer dared 
to vent his ideas and feelings with regard to 
childhood and concerning the spiritual aspira- 
tions of all mankind; in other words, he chose 
a theme for some other reason than because it 
was good, tried theater material ; and the world 
knows the result. It may be said without hesi- 
tation that more plays fail in the attempt to 
modify view in favor of the supposed view of 
others — the audience, the manager or somebody 
else — than fail because the dramatist has stur- 
dily stuck to his point of view and honestly set 
down in his story his own private reaction to 
the wonderful thing called life ; a general pos- 
session and yet not one thing, but having as 

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HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

many sides as there are persons in the world 
to live it. 

Consider, for example, the number of 
dramas that, instead of carrying through the 
theme consistently to the end, are deflected 
from their proper course through the play- 
wright's desire (more often it is an unwilling 
concession to others' desire) to furnish that 
tradition-condiment, a "pleasant ending." 
Now everybody normal would rather have a 
play end well than not; he who courts misery 
for its own sake is a fool. But, if not a fool, 
he does not wish the pleasantness at the ex- 
pense of truth, because then the pleasantness 
is no longer pleasant to the educated taste, and 
so defeats its own end. And it is an observed 
fact that some stories, whether fiction or drama, 
"begin to end well," as Stevenson expressed it; 
while others, just as truly, begin to end ill. 
Hence, when such themes are manhandled by 
the cheap, dishonest wresting of events or char- 
acters or both, so as presumably to send the 
audience home "happy," we get a wretched 
malversion of art, — and without at all attaining 

110 



THE PLAY AS THEME 

the object in view. For even the average, or 
garden-variety, of audience is uneasy at the in- 
sult offered its inteUigence in such a nefarious 
transaction. It has been asked to witness a 
piece of real life, for, testimony to the con- 
trary notwithstanding, that is what an audience 
takes every play to be. Up to a certain point, 
this presentation of life is convincing; then, 
for the sake of leaving an impression that all is 
well because two persons are united who never 
should be, or because the hero didn't die when 
he really did, or because coincidence is piled on 
coincidence to make a fairy tale situation at 
which a fairly intelligent cow would rebel, 
presto, a lie has to be told that would not de- 
ceive the very children in the seats. It is pleas- 
ant to record truthfully that this miserable and 
mistaken demand on the part of the short- 
sighted purveyors of commercialized dramatic 
wares is yielding gradually to the more en- 
lightened notion that any audience wants a 
play to be consistent with itself, and feels that 
too high a price can be paid even for the good 

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HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

ending whose false deification has played havoc 
with true dramatic interests. 

Another mode of dishonesty, in which the 
writer of a play fails in theme, is to be found 
whenever, instead of sticking to his subject 
matter and giving it the unity of his main in- 
terest and the wholeness of effect derived from 
paying it undivided attention, extraneous mat- 
ter is introduced for the sake of temporary 
alleviation. Not to stick to your theme is al- 
most as bad at times as to have none. No 
doubt the temptation comes to all practical 
playwrights and is a considerable one. But 
it must be resisted if they are to remain self- 
respecting artists. The late Clyde Fitch, 
skilled man of the theater though he was, 
sinned not seldom in this respect. He some- 
times introduced scenes effective for novelty 
and truth of local color, but so little related 
to the whole that the trained auditor might well 
have met him with the famous question asked 
by the Greek audiences of their dramatists who 
strayed from their theme: "What has this to 
do with Apollo?" The remark applies to the 

112 



THE PLAY AS THEME 

drastically powerful* scene in his posthumous 
play The City, where the theme which was 
plainly announced in the first act is lost sight 
of in the dramatist's desire to use material well 
adapted to secure a sensational effect in his 
climax. It is only fair to say that, had this 
drama received the final molding at the au- 
thor's hands, it might have been modified to 
some extent. But there is no question that 
this was a tendency with Fitch. 

The late Oscar Wilde had an almost un- 
paralleled gift for witty epigrammatic dia- 
logue. In his two clever comedies, Lady 
Windermere's Fan and A Woman of No Im- 
portance, he allowed this gift to run away 
with him to such an extent that the opening 
acts of both pieces contain many speeches lifted 
from his notebooks, seemingly, and placed arbi- 
trarily in the mouths of sundry persons of the 
play: some of the speeches could quite as well 
have been spoken by others. This constituted 
a defect which might have seriously militated 
against the success of those dramas had they 
not possessed in full measure brilliant qualities 

lis 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

of genuine constructive play-making. The 
theme, after all, was there, once it was started ; 
and so was the deft handling. But dialogue 
not motivated by character or necessitated by 
story is always an injury, and much drama 
to-day suffers from this fault. The producer 
of the play declares that its tone is too steadily 
serious and demands the insertion of some 
humor to lighten it, and the playwright, poor, 
helpless wight, yields, though he knows he is 
sinning against the Holy Ghost of his art. 
Or perhaps the play is too short to fill the re- 
quired time and so padding is deemed neces- 
sary ; * or it may be that the ignorance or short- 
sightedness of those producing the play will 
lead them to confuse the interests of the chief 
player with that of the piece itself; and so a 
departure from theme follow, and unity be sac- 
rificed. That is what unity means : sticking to 
theme. 

* When our theater has become thoroughly artistic, 
plays will not, as at present, be stretched out beyond the 
natural size, but will be confined to a shorter playing 
time and the evening filled out with a curtain raiser or 
after piece, as is now so common abroad. 

114 



THE PLAY AS THEME 

And unity of story, be sure, waits on unity 
of theme. This insistence upon singleness of 
purpose in a play, clinging to it against all 
allurements, does not imply that what is known 
as a subplot may not be allowed in a 'drama. 
It was common in the past and can still be seen 
to-day, though the tendency of modern technic 
is to abandon it for the sake of greater 
emphasis upon the main plot and the resulting 
tightening of the texture, avoiding any risk 
of a splitting of interest. However, a sec- 
ondary or subplot in the right hands — as we 
see it in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice ^ or, 
for a modern instance, in Pinero's Sweet Lav- 
ender — is legitimate enough. Those who ma- 
nipulate it with success will be careful to see 
that the minor plot shall never appear for a 
moment to be major; and that both strands 
shall be interwoven into an essential unity of 
design, which is admirably illustrated in Shake- 
speare's comedy just mentioned. 
. Have a theme then, let it be quite yourjown, 
and stick to it, is a succinct injunction which 
every dramatist will do well to heed and the 

115 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

critic in the seat will do well to demand. 
Neither one nor the other should ever forget 
that the one and only fundamental unity in 
drama, past, present and to come, is unity of 
idea, and the unity of action which gathers 
about that idea as surely as iron filings around 
the magnetized center. The unities of time and 
place are conditional upon the kind of drama 
aimed at, and the temporal and physical char- 
acteristic of the theater; the Greeks obeyed 
them for reasons peculiar to the Greeks, and 
many lands, beginning with the Romans, have 
imitated these so-called laws since. But Shake- 
speare destroyed them for England, and to- 
day, if unity of time and place are to be seen 
in an Ibsen play, it simply means that, in the 
psychological drama he writes, time and place 
are naturally restricted. But in the unity of 
action which means unity of theme we have a 
principle which looks to the constitution of the 
human mind ; for the sake of that ease of atten- 
tion which helps to hold interest and produce 
pleasure, such unity there must be ; the mind of 
man (when he has one) is made that way. 

116 



THE PLAY AS THEME 

There is a special reason why the intelligent 
play-goer must insist upon this fundamental 
unity : because much in our present imaginative 
literature is, as to form, in direct conflict with 
that appeal to a sustained effect of unity of- 
fered by a well-wrought drama. The short 
story that is all too brief, the vaudeville turn, 
the magazine habit of reading a host of unre- 
lated scamped trifles, all militate against the 
habit of concentrated attention; all the more 
reason why it should be cultivated. 

Let me return to the thought that the dram- 
atist, in making the theme his own, may be 
tempted to present a view of life not only per- 
sonal but eccentric and vagarious to the point 
of insanity. 

His view, to put it bluntly, may represent a 
crack-brained distortion of life rather than life 
as it is experienced by men in general. In such 
a case, and obviously, his drama will be inefl^ec- 
tive and objectionable, in the exact degree that 
it departs from what may be called broadly the 
normal and the possible. As I have already 
asserted, distortion for distortion, even a crazy 

117 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

handling of theme that is honest is to be pre- 
ferred to one consciously a deflection from be- 
lief. But the former is not right because the 
latter is wrong. Both should be avoided, and 
will be if the play-maker be at the same time 
sincere and healthily representative in his re- 
action to life of humanity at large. The really 
great plays, and the good plays that have shown 
a lasting quality, have sinned in neither of 
these particulars. 

It is especially of import that our critic-in- 
the-seat should insist on this matter of normal 
appeal, because ours happens to be a day when 
personal vagaries, extravagant theories and 
lawless imaginings are granted a freedom in 
literary and other art in general such as an 
earlier day hardly conceived of. The abuses 
under the mighty name of Art are many and 
flagrant. All the more need for the knowing 
spectator in the theater, or he who reads the 
play at home, to be prepared for his function, 
quick to reprimand alike tame subserviency or 
the abnormalities of unrestrained "genius." It 
is fair to say that absolute honesty on the dram- 

118 



THE PLAY AS THEME 

atist's part in the conception and presentation 
of theme will meet all legitimate criticisms of 
his work. Within his limitations, we shall get 
the best that is in him, if he will only show 
us life as he sees it, and have the courage of 
his convictions, allowing no son of man to warp 
his work from that purpose. 



119 



CHAPTER VII 

METHOD AND STRUCTURE 
I 

O O far we have considered the material of 
^^ the dramatist, his theme and subject mat- 
ter, and his attitude toward it. But his method 
in conceiving this material and of handling it is 
of great importance and we may now examine 
this a little in detail, to realize the peculiar 
problem that confronts him. 

At the beginning let it be understood that 
the dramatist must see his subject dramatically. 
Every stage story should be seen or conceived 
in a central moment which is the explanation 
of the whole play, its reason for being. With- 
out that moment, the drama could not exist ; if 
the story were told, the plot unfolded without 
presenting that scene, the play would fall flat, 
nay, there would, strictly speaking, be no play 
there. That is why the French (leaders in 

120 



METHOD AND STRUCTURE 

nomenclature, as in all else dramatic) call it the 
scene a faire, the scene that one must do; or, 
to adopt the English equivalent offered by Mr. 
Archer in his interesting and able manual of 
stagecraft entitled Playmaking, the obligatory- 
scene : that is, the scene one is obliged to show. 
This moment in the story is a climax, because 
it is the crowning result of all the preceding 
growth of the drama up to a point where the 
steadily increasing interest has reached its 
height and an electric effect of suspense and 
excitement results. This suspensive excitement 
depends upon the clash of human wills against 
each other or against circumstances ; events are 
so tangled that they can be no further involved 
and something must happen in the way of cut- 
ting the knot; the fates of the persons are so 
implicated that their lives must be either saved 
or destroyed, in order to break the deadlock. 
Thus along with the clash goes a crisis pre- 
sented in a breathless climactic effect which is 
the central and imperative scene of the piece, 
the backbone of every good play. 

If this obligatory scene be absent, you may 

121 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

at once suspect the dramatist; whatever his 
other virtues (fine dialogue, excellent charac- 
terization, or still other merits), it is probable 
he is not one genuinely called to tell a story in 
the manner of drama within stage limitations. 
It is sometimes said that a play is written 
backward. The remark has in mind this fun- 
damental fact of the climax; all that goes be- 
fore leads up to it, is preparation for it, and 
might conceivably be written after the obliga- 
tory scene has been conceived and shaped; all 
that comes after it is an attempt to retire 
gracefully from the great moment, rounding it 
out, showing its results, and conducting the 
spectator back to the common light of day in 
such a way as not to be dull, or conventional 
or anti-climactic. What follows this inevitable 
scene is (however disguised) at bottom a sort 
of bridge conveying the auditor from the su- 
preme pleasure of the theater back to the rather 
humdrum experience of actual life ; it is an ex- 
periment in gradation. And the prepared 
play-goer will deny the coveted award of well 
done to any play, albeit from famous hands 

122 



METHOD AND STRUCTURE 

and by no means wanting in good qualities, 
which nevertheless fails in this prime requisite 
of good drama : the central, dynamic scene illu- 
minating all that goes before and follows after, 
without which the play, after all, has no right 
to existence. 

With the coming of the modern psychologic 
school of which Galsworthy, Barker and Ben- 
nett are exemplars, there is a distinct tendency 
to minimize or even to eliminate this obligatory 
scene; an effort which should be carefully 
watched and remonstrated against; since it is 
the laying of an axe at the roots of dramatic 
writing. It may be confessed that in some in- 
stances the results of this violation of a car- 
dinal principle are so charming as to blind the 
onlooker perhaps to the danger ; as in the case 
of Milestones by Messrs. Bennett and Knob- 
lauch, or The Pigeon by Galsworthy, or Louis 
Parker's Georgian picture. Pomander Walk, 
But this only confuses the issue. Such drama 
may prove delightful for other reasons; the 
thing to bear in mind is that they are such 
in spite of the giving up of the peculiar, quin- 

123 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

tessential merit of drama in its full sense. 
Their virtues are non-dramatic virtues, and 
they succeed, in so far as success awaits them, 
in spite of the violation of a principle, not 
because of it. They can be, and should be, 
heartily enjoyed, so long as this is plainly un- 
derstood and the two accomplishments are per- 
ceived as separate. For it may be readily 
granted that a pleasant and profitable evening 
at the theater may be spent, without the very 
particular appeal which is dramatic coming 
into the experience at all. There are more 
things in the modern theater than drama ; which 
is well, if we but make the discrimination. 

But for the purposes of intelligent compre- 
hension of what is drama, just that and naught 
else, the theater-goer will find it not amiss to 
hold fast to the idea that a play without its 
central scene hereinbefore described is not a 
play in the exact definition of that form of art, 
albeit ever so enjoyable entertainment. The 
history of drama in its failures and successes 
bears out the statement. And of all nations, 
France can be studied most profitably with 

124 



METHOD AND STRUCTURE 

this in mind, since the French have always been 
past masters in the f eehng for the essentially 
dramatic, and centuries ago developed the skill 
to produce it. The fact that we get such a 
term as the scene a faire from them points to 
this truth. 

Accepting the fact, then, that a play sound 
in conception and construction has and must 
have a central scene which acts as a centripetal 
force upon the whole drama, unifying and 
solidifying it, the next matter to consider is the 
subdivision of the play into acts and scenes. 
Since the whole story is shown before the foot- 
lights, scenes and acts are such divisions as 
shall best mark off and properly accentuate the 
stages of the story, as it is unfolded. Conven- 
tion has had something to do with this arrange- 
ment and number, as we learn from a glance at 
the development of the stage story. The ear- 
lier English drama accepted the five-act divi- 
sion under classic influence, though the greatest 
dramatist of the past, Shakespeare, did so only 
half-heartedly, as may be realized by looking at 
the first complete edition of his plays, the First 

125 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

Folio of 1621. Hamlet J for instance, as there 
printed, gives the first two acts, and thereafter 
is innocent of any act division; and Romeo and 
Juliet has no such division at all. But with 
later editors, the classic tradition became more 
and more a convention and the student with 
the modernized text in hand has no reason to 
suspect the original facts. An old-fashioned 
work like Freitag's Technique of the Drama 
assumes this form as final and endeavors to 
study dramatic construction on that assump- 
tion. 

The scenes, too, were many in the Ehza- 
bethan period, for the reason that there was 
no scene shifting in the modern sense ; as many 
scenes might therefore be imagined as were de- 
sirable during the continuous performance. It 
has remained for modern technic to discover 
that there was nothing irrevocable about this 
fivefold division of acts; and that, in the at- 
tempt at a general simplification of play struc- 
ture, we can do better by a reduction of them 
to three or four. Hence, five acts have shrunk 
to four or three ; so that to-day the form pre- 

126 



METHOD AND STRUCTURE 

f erred by the best dramatic artists, looking to 
Ibsen for leadership, is the three-act play, 
though the nature of the story often makes 
four desirable. A careful examination of the 
best plays within a decade will serve to show 
that this is definitely the tendency. 

The three-act play, with its recognition that 
every art structure should have a beginning, 
middle and end — Aristotle's simple but pro- 
found observation on the tragedy of his day — 
might seem to be that which marks the ulti- 
mate technic of drama ; yet it would be pedantic 
and foolish to deny that the simplification may 
proceed further still and two acts succeed three, 
or, further still, one act embrace the complete 
drama, thus returning to the "scene individ- 
able" of the Greeks and Shakespeare. Cer- 
tainly, the whole evolution of form points that 
way. 

But, whatever the final simplification, the 
play as a whole will present certain construc- 
tive problems; problems which confront the 
aim ever to secure, most economically and ef- 
fectively, the desired dramatic result. The first 

127 



r^ 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

of these is the problem of the opening act, 
which we may now examine in particular. 

II 

The first act has a definite aim and difficul- 
ties that belong to itself alone. Broadly 
speaking, its business is so to open the story ^ 
as to leave the audience at the fall of the first ^^^ 
curtain with a clear idea of what it is about ; not 
knowing too much, wishing to know more, and 
having well in mind the antecedent conditions 
which made the story at its beginning possible. 
If, at the act's end, too much has been revealed, 
the interest projected forward sags; if too lit- 
tle, the audience fails to get the idea around 
which the story revolves, and so is not pleas- 
urably anxious for its continuance. If the an- 
tecedent conditions have not clearly been made 
manifest, some omitted link may throw con- 
fusion upon all that follows. On the other 
hand, if too much time has been expended in 
setting forth the events that lead up to the 
story's start on the stage, with the rise of the 
curtain, not enough time may be left, within 

128 



METHOD AND STRUCTURE 

act limits, to hold the attention and fix interest 
so it may sustain the entr'act break and fasten 
upon the next act. 

Thus it will be seen that a successful open- 
ing act is a considerable test of the dramatist's 
skill. 

Another drawback complicates the matter. 
The playwright has at his disposal in the first 
act from half to three-quarters of an hour in 
which to effect his purpose. But he must lose 
from five to ten minutes of this precious time 
allotment, at the best very short, because, ac- 
cording to the detestable Anglo-Saxon conven- 
tion, the audience is not fairly seated when 
the play begins, and general attention there- 
fore not riveted upon the stage action. Un- 
der ideal conditions, and they have never ex- 
isted in all respects in any time or country, the 
audience will be in place at the curtain's rise, 
alert to catch every word and movement. As 
a matter of fact, this practically never occurs ; 
particularly in America, where the drama has 
never been taken so seriously as an art as 
music; for some time now people have not been 

129 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

allowed, in a hall devoted to that gentle sister 
art, to straggle in during the performance of a 
composition, or the self -exploitation of a sing- 
er, thereby disturbing the more enlightened 
hearers who have come on time, and regard it, 
very properly, as part of their breeding to do 
so. But in the theater, as we all know, the 
barbarous custom obtains of admitting late 
comers, so that for the first few minutes of 
the performance a steady insult is thus offered 
to the play, the players, and the portion of the 
audience already in their seats. It may be 
hoped, parenthetically, that as our theater 
gradually becomes civilized this survival of the 
manners of bushmen may become purely his- 
toric. At present, however, the practical play- 
wright accepts the existing conditions, as per- 
force he must, and writes his play accordingly. 
And so the first few minutes of a well-con- 
structed drama, it may be noticed, are gener- 
ally devoted to some incident, interesting or 
amusing in itself, preferably external so as to 
catch the eye, but not too vital, and involving, 
as a rule, minor characters, without revealing 

130 



METHOD AND STRUCTURE 

anything really crucial in the action. The mat- 
ter presented thus is not so much important 
as action that leads up to what is important; 
and its lack of importance must not be implied 
in too barefaced a way, lest attention be drawn 
to it. This part of the play marks time, and 
yet is by way of preparation for the entrance 
of the main character or characters. 

Much skill is needed, and has been devel- 
oped, in regard to the marshaling of the prece- 
dent conditions: to which the word exposition 
has been by common consent given. Exposi- 
tion to-day is by no means what it was in 
Shakespeare's; indeed, it has been greatly re- 
fined arid improved upon. In the earlier tech- 
nic this prefatory material was introduced 
more frankly and openly in the shape of a 
prologue; or if the prologue was not used, at 
least the information was conveyed directly 
and at once to the audience by means of minor 
characters, stock figures like the servant or 
confidante, often employed mainly, or even 
solely, for that purpose. This made the de- 
vice too obvious for modern taste, and such as 

131 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

to injure the illusion; the play lost its effect of 
presenting" truthfully a piece of life, just when 
it was particularly important to seem such; 
that is, at the beginning. For with the coming 
of the subtler methods culminating in the deft 
technic of an Ibsen, which aims to draw ever 
closer to a real presentation of life on the stage, 
and so strove to find methods of depiction 
which should not obtrude artifice except when 
unavoidable, the stage artist has learned to in- 
terweave these antecedent circumstances with 
the story shown on the stage before the au- 
dience. And the result is that to-day the ex- 
position of an Ibsen, a Shaw, a Wilde, a Pinero 
or a Jones is so managed as hardly to be de- 
tected save by the expert in stage mechanics. 
The intelligent play-goer will derive pleasure 
and profit from a study of Ibsen's growth in 
this respect ; observing, for example, how much 
more deftly exposition is hidden in a late work 
like Hedda Gahler than in a comparatively 
early one like Pillars of Society; and, again, 
how bald and obvious was this master's technic 
in this respect when he began in the middle of 

132 



METHOD AND STRUCTURE 

the nineteenth century to write his historical 
plays. 

In general, it is well worth while to watch 
the handling of the first act on the part of 
acknowledged craftsmen with respect to the 
important matter of introducing into the 
framework of a two hours' spectacle all that 
has transpired before the picture is exhibited 
to the spectators. 

One of the definite dangers of the first act 
is that of giving an audience a false lead as to 
character or turn of story. By some bit of dia- 
logue, or even by an interpolated gesture on 
the part of an actor who transcends his rights 
(a misleading thing, as likely as not to be 
charged to the playwright), the auditor is put 
on a wrong scent, or there is aroused in him an 
expectation never to be realized. Thus the real 
issue is obscured, and later trouble follows as 
the true meaning is divulged. A French critic, 
commenting on the performance in Paris of a 
play by Bernard Shaw, says that its meaning 
was greatly confused because two of the char- 
acters took the unwarranted liberty of ex- 

133 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

changing a kiss, for which, of course, there was 
no justification in the stage business as indi- 
cated by the author. All who know Shaw know 
that he has very little interest in stage kisses. 
Closely associated with this mistake, and far 
more disastrous, is such a treatment of act one 
as to suggest a theme full of interest and there- 
fore welcome, which is then not carried through 
the remainder of the drama. Fitch's The City 
has been already referred to with this in mind. 
A more recent example may be found in Veil- 
ler's popular melodrama. Within the Law, 
The extraordinary vogue of this melodrama is 
sufficient proof that it possesses some of the 
main qualities of skillful theater craft: a 
strong, interesting fable, vital characterization, 
and considerable feeling for stage situation 
and climax, with the forthright hand of execu- 
tion. Nevertheless, it distinctly fails to keep 
the promise of the first act, where, at the fall 
of the curtain, the audience has become par- 
ticularly interested in a sociological problem, 
only to be asked in the succeeding acts to for- 
get it in favor of a conventional treatment of 

134. 



i 



METHOD AND STRUCTURE 

stock melodramatic material, with the usual 
thieves, detectives pitted against each other, 
and gunplay for the central scene of surprise 
and capture. That such current plays as The 
City and Within the Law can get an unusual 
hearing, in spite of these defects, suggests the 
uncritical nature of American audiences; but 
quite as truly implies that drama may be very 
good, indeed, in most respects while falling 
short of the caliber we demand of masterpieces. 
With the opening act, then, so handled as to 
avoid these pitfalls, the dramatist is ready to 
go on with his task. He has sufficiently aroused 
the interest of his audience to give it a pleas- 
urable sense of entertainment ahead, without 
imparting so much knowledge as to leave too 
little for guesswork and lessen the curiosity 
necessary for one who must still spend an hour 
and a half in a place of bad air and too heated 
temperature. He has awakened attention and 
directed it upon a theme and story, yet left it 
tantalizingly but not confusingly incomplete. 
Now he has before him the problem of unfold- 
ing his play and making it center in the climac- 

1S5 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

tic scene which will make or mar the piece. We 
must observe, then, how he develops his story 
in that part of the play intermediate between 
the introduction and the crisis; the second act 
of a three-act drama or the third if the four- 
act form be chosen. 



136 



CHAPTER VIII 

DEVELOPMENT 

r I iHE story being properly started, it be- 
-■- comes the dramatist's business, as we saw, 
so to advance it that it will develop naturally 
and with such increase of interest as to tighten 
the hold upon the audience as the plot reaches 
its crucial point, the obligatory scene. This 
can only be done by the sternest selection 
of those elements of story which can be fitly 
shown on the stage, or without a loss of inter- 
est be inferred clearly from off-stage occur- 
rences. Since action is of the essence of 
drama, all narrative must be shunned that deals 
with matters which, being vital to the play 
and naturally dramatic material, can be pre- 
sented directly to the eye and ear. And char- 
acter must be economically handled, so that as 
it is revealed the revelation at the same time 
furthers the story, pushing it forward instead 

137 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

of holding it static while the character is be- 
ing unfolded. Dialogue should always do one 
of these two things and the best dialogue will 
do both: develop plot in the very moment that 
it exhibits the unfolding psychology of the 
dramatis personce. The fact that in the best 
modern work plot is for the sake of character 
rather than the reverse does not violate this 
principle; it simply redistributes emphasis. 
Character without plot may possibly be attrac- 
tive in the hands of a Galsworthy or Barker; 
but the result is extremely likely to be tame 
and inconclusive. And, contrariwise, plot with- 
out character, that is, with character that lacks 
individuality and meaning and merely offers 
a peg upon which to hang a series of happen- 
ings, results in primitive drama that, being des- 
titute of psychology, falls short of the finest 
and most serious possibilities of the stage. 

This portion of the play, then, intermediate 
between introduction and climax, is very im- 
portant and tries the dramatist's soul, in a way, 
quite as truly as do beginning and end. 

In a three-act play — which we may assume as 

138 



DEVELOPMENT 

normal, without forgetting that four are often 
necessary to the best teUing of the story, and 
that five acts are still found convenient under 
certain circumstances, as in Rostand's Cyrano 
de Bergerac and Shaw's Pygmalion — ^the 
work of development falls on the second act, 
in the main. The climax of action is likely to 
be at the end of the act, although plays can be 
mentioned, and good ones, where the play- 
wright has seen fit to place his crucial scene 
well on into act three. In this matter he is be- 
tween two dangers and must steer his course 
wisely to avoid the rocks of his Scylla and 
Charybdis. If his climax come too soon, an 
effect of anti-climax is likely to be made, in 
an act too long when the main stress is over. 
If, on the other hand, he put his strongest ef- 
fect at the end of the piece or close to it, while 
the result is admirable in sustaining interest 
and saving the best for the last, the close is apt 
to be too abrupt and unfinished for the pur- 
poses of art ; sending the audience out into the 
street, dazed after the shock of the obligatory 
scene. 

139 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

Therefore, the skillful playwright inclines 
to leave sufficient of the play after the climax 
to make an agreeable rounding out of the fable, 
tie up loose ends and secure an artistic effect 
of completing the whole structure without 
tedium or anti-climax. He thus preserves 
unity, yet escapes an impression of loose tex- 
ture in the concluding part of his play. It may 
be seen that this makes the final act a very spe- 
cial problem in itself, a fact we shall consider 
in the later treatment. 

And now, with the second-act portion of the 
play in mind, standing for growth, increased 
tension, and an ever-greater interest, a pecu- 
liarity of the play which differentiates it from 
the fiction-story can be mentioned. It refers 
to the nature of the interest and the attitude 
of the auditor toward the story. 

In fiction, interest depends largely upon sus- 
pense due to the uncertainty of the happen- 
ings; the reader, unaware of the outcome of 
events, has a pleasing sense of curiosity and a 
stimulating desire to know the end. He reads 
on, under the prick of this desire. The novel- 

140 



DEVELOPMENT 

ist keeps him more or less in the dark, and in 
so doing fans the flame of interest. What will 
be the fate of the hero? Will the heroine es- 
cape from the impending doom? Will the two 
be mated before the Finis is written? Such are 
the natural questions in a good novel, in spite 
of all our modern overlaying of fiction with 
subtler psychologic suggestions. 

But the stage story is different. The au- 
dience from the start is taken into the drama- 
tist's confidence; it is allowed to know some- 
thing that is not known to the dramatis per- 
sonce themselves ; or, at least, not known to cer- 
tain very important persons of the story, let 
us say, the hero and heroine, to give them the 
simple old-fashioned description. And the au- 
dience, taken in this flattering way into the 
playwright's secret, finds its particular pleas- 
ure in seeing how the blind puppets up on the 
stage act in an ignorance which if shared by 
the spectators would qualify, if not destroy, 
the special kind of excitement they are enjoy- 
ing. 

Just why this difference between play and 

141 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

novel exists is a nice question not so easily an- 
swered; that it does exist, nobody who has 
thought upon the subject can doubt. Occa- 
sionally, it is true, successful plays are written 
in apparent violation of this principle. That 
eminently skillful and effective piece of theater 
work, Bernstein's The Thief, is an example; a 
large part of the whole first act, if not all of 
it, takes place without the spectator suspecting 
that the young wife, who is the real thief, is 
implicated in the crime. Nevertheless, such 
dramas are the exception. Broadly speaking, 
sound dramaturgy makes use of the principle 
of knowing cooperation of the audience in the 
plot, and always will; if for no other reason, 
because the direct stage method of showing a 
story makes it impracticable to hoodwink those 
in the auditorium and also perhaps because the 
necessary compression of events in a play 
would make the suddenness of the discovery 
on the part of the audience that they had been 
fooled unpleasant: an unpleasantness, it may 
be surmised, intensified by the additional fact 
that the fooling has been done in the presence 



142 



DEVELOPMENT 

of others — their fellow theater-goers. The 
quickness of the effects possible to the stage 
and inability of the playwright to use repeti- 
tion no doubt also enter in the result. The 
novelist can return, explain, dwell upon the 
causes of the reader's readjustment to changed 
characters or surprising turns of circumstance ; 
the dramatist must go forthright on and make 
his strokes tell for once and for all. 

Be this as it may, the theater story, as a 
rule, by a tradition which in all probability 
roots in an instinct and a necessity, invites the 
listener to be a sort of eavesdropper, to come 
into a secret and from this vantage point watch 
the perturbations of a group of less-knowing 
creatures shown behind the footlights: he not 
only sees, but oversees. As an outcome of this 
trait, results follow which also set the play in 
contrast with the other ways of story telling. 
The pla^ywright should not deceive his audience 
either in the manipulation of characters or oc- 
currences. Pleasurable as this may be in fic- 
tion, in the theater it is disastrous. The au- 
dience, disturbed in its superior sense of knowl- 

143 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

edge, sitting as it were like the gods apart and 
asked suddenly, peremptorily, to reconstruct 
its suppositions, is baffled and then irritated. 
This is one of several reasons why, in the de- 
lineation of character on the stage, it is of very 
dubious desirability to spring a surprise ; mak- 
ing the seeming hero turn out a villain or the 
presumptive villain blossom into a paragon of 
all the virtues : as Dickens does in Our Mutual 
Friend; in that case, to the added zest of the 
reader. The risk in subtilizing stage charac- 
ter lies just here. Persons shown so fleetingly 
in a few selected moments of their whole lives, 
after the stage fashion, must be seen in high 
relief, if they are to be clearly grasped by the 
onlookers. Conceding that in actual life folk 
in general are an indeterminate gray rather 
than stark black and white, it is none the less 
necessary to use primary colors, for the most 
part, in painting them, in order that they may 
be realized. Here again we encounter the limi- 
tations of art in depicting life, and its differ- 
ence therefrom. In a certain sense, therefore, 
stage characters must be more primitive, more 

144 



DEVELOPMENT 

elemental, as well as elementary, than the char- 
acters in novels, a thought we shall have occa- 
sion to come back to, from another angle, 
later on. 

Equally is it true that good technic forbids 
the false lead: any hint or suggestion which 
has the appearance of conducting on to some- 
thing to come later in the play, which shall 
verify and fortify the previous allusion or im- 
plication. Every word spoken is thus, besides 
its immediate significance, a preparation for 
something ahead. It is a continual temptation 
to a dramatist with a feeling for character (a 
gift most admirable in itself) to do brush work 
on some person of his play, which, while it may 
illuminate the character as such, may involve 
episodic treatment that will entirely mislead an 
audience into supposing that the author has 
far more meaning in the action shown than he 
intended. These false leads are of course al- 
ways the enemies of unity and to be all the 
more carefully guarded against in proportion 
to their attraction. So__attractive, indeed, is 
this lure into by-paths away from the main 

145 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

^ath of progress that it is fairly astonishing 
to see how often even veteran playwrights fall 
in love with some character, disproportionately 
handle it, and invent unnecessary tangential 
incidents in order to exhibit it. And, rather 
discouragingly, an audience forgives episodic 
treatment and over-emphasis in the enjoyment 
of the character, as such; willing to let the 
drama suffer for the sake of a welcome detail. 
In developing his story in this intermediate 
part of it, a more insidious, all-pervasive lure 
is to be seen in the change in the very type of 
drama intended at first, or clearly promised in 
act one. The play may start out to be a comedy 
of character and then be deflected into one 
where character is lost sight of in the interest 
of plot; or a play farcical in the conditions 
given may turn serious on the dramatist's 
hands. Or, worse yet, that which is a comedy 
in feeling and drift, may in the course of the 
development become tragic in conclusion. Or, 
once more, what begins for tragedy, with its 
implied seriousness of interest in character and 
philosophy of life, may resolve itself, under the 

146 



^1 



DEVELOPMENT 

fascination of plot and of histrionic eif ectiv- 
ism, into melodrama, with its undue emphasis 
upon external sensation and its correlative loss 
in depth and artistry. 

All these and still other permutations a play 
suffers in the sin committed whenever the real 
type or genre of a drama, implied at the start, 
is violated in the later handling. The history 
of the stage offers many illustrations. In a 
play not far, everything considered, from be- 
ing the greatest in the tongue, Shakespeare's 
Hamlet, it may be questioned if there be not 
a departure in the final act from the emphasis 
placed upon psychology in the acts that lead up 
to it. The character of the melancholy prince 
is the main thing, the pivot of interest, up to 
that point; but in the fifth act the external 
method of completing the story, which involves 
the elimination of so many of the persons of 
the play, has somewhat the effect of a change 
of kind, an abrupt and incongruous cutting of 
the Gordian knot. Doubtless, the facts as to 
the composite nature of this play viewed in its 

total history may have much to do with such an 

147 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

effect, if it be set down here aright.* In any 
case, it is certain that every week during the 
dramatic season in New York new plays are to 
be seen which, by this minghng of genres, fall 
short of the symmetry of true art. 

One other requirement in the handling of the 
play in the section between introduction and 
climax: the playwright must not linger too 
long over it, nor yet shorten it in his eager- 
ness to reach the scene which is the crown and 
culmination of all his labors. Probably the ex- 
perienced craftsman is likely to make the sec- 
ond mistake rather than the first, though both 
are often to be noted. He fails sometimes to 
realize the increase in what I may call re^ier- 
beratory power which is gained by a slower ap- 
proach to the great moment through a series of 
deft suggestions of what is to come ; appetizing 
hints and withdrawals, reconnaitres before the 
actual engagement, all of it preparatory to the 
real struggle that is pending. It is a law of 

* For a good discussion of this, see "The Genesis of 
Hamlet," by Charlton M. Lewis (Houghton, Mifflin & 
Company). 

148 



DEVELOPMENT 

the theater, applying to dialogue, character 
and scene, that twice-told is always an advan- 
tage. One distinguished playwright rather 
cynically declared that you must tell an au- 
dience you are going to do it, are doing it, and 
have done it. Examples in every aspect of 
theater work abound. The catch phrase put in 
the mouth of the comic character is only mildly 
amusing at first; it gains steadily with repe- 
tition until, introduced at just the right mo- 
ment, the house rocks with laughter. Often 
the difference between a detached witticism, 
like one of Oscar Wilde's mots, and a bit of 
genuine dramatic humor rests in the fact that 
the fun lies in the setting: it is a mot de situa- 
tion, to borrow the French expression, not a 
mere mot d'esprit. By appearing to be near 
a crisis, and then introducing a barrier from 
which it is necessary to draw back and ap- 
proach once more over the same ground, ten- 
sion is increased and tenfold the effect secured 
when at last the match is laid to the fire. 

Plenty of plays fail of their full effect be- 
cause the climax is come at before every ounce 

149 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

of value has been wrung out of preceding 
events. If the screen scene in The School for 
Scandal be studied with this principle in mind, 
the student will have as good an object lesson 
as English drama can show of skilled leading 
up to a climax by so many little steps of care- 
fully calculated effect that the final fall of the 
screen remains one of the great moments in the 
theater, despite the mundane nature of the 
theme and the limited appeal to the deeper 
qualities of human nature. Within its limita- 
tions (and theater art, as any other, is to be 
judged by success under accepted conditions) 
Sheridan's work in this place and play is a per- 
manent master-stroke of brilliant technic, as 
well as one explanation of the persistence of 
that delightful eighteenth century comedy. 

But the dramatist, as I have said, may also 
err in delaying so long in his preparation and 
growth, that the audience, being ready for the 
climax before it arrives, will be cold when it 
comes, and so the effect will hang fire. It is 
safe to say that in a three-act play, where the 
first act has consumed thirty-five to forty min- 

150 



DEVELOPMENT 

utes, and the climax is to occur at the fall of the 
second curtain, it is well if the intermediate act 
do not last much above the same length of time. 
Of course, the nature of the story and the de- 
mands it makes will modify the statement ; but 
it applies broadly to the observed phenomena. 
The first act, for reasons already explained, is 
apt to be the longest of the three, as the last 
act is the shortest, other things being equal. If 
the first act, therefore, run fifty minutes, forty 
to forty-five, or even thirty-five, would be 
shapely for act two; which, with twenty to 
twenty-five minutes given to the final act, 
would allot to the entire play about two hours 
and ten minutes, which is close to an ideal play- 
ing time for a drama under modern conditions. 
This time allowance, with the added fraction of 
minutes given to the entr'acts thrown in, would, 
for a play which began at 8:15, drop the final 
curtain at about 10 :30. 

In case the climax, as has been assumed of a 
three-act play, be placed at the end of the sec- 
ond act, the third act will obviously be shorter. 
Should, however, the growth be projected into 

151 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

the third act, and the chmax be sprung at tf 
point within this act — ^beyond the middle, let 
us say — then the final act is lengthened and 
act two shortened in proportion. The prin- 
ciple is that, with the main interest over, it is 
hard to hold the auditor's attention; whereas 
if the best card is still up the sleeve we may 
assume willingness to prolong the game. 

With the shift of climax from an earlier to 
a later place in the piece, the technic of the 
handling is changed only according to these 
commonsense demands. A knowledge of the 
psychology of human beings brought together 
for the purpose of entertainment will go far 
toward settling the question. And whether 
the playwright place his culminating effect in 
act two or three, or whether for good and suffi- 
cient reasons of story complication the three 
acts become four or even five, the principles set 
forth in the above pages apply with only such 
modifications as are made necessary by the 
change. 

The theater-goer, seeking to pass an intelli- 
gent opinion upon a drama as a whole, will 

152 



DEVELOPMENT 

during this period of growth ask of the play- 
wright that he keep the auditor's interest and 
increase it symmetrically ; that he show the plot 
unfolding in action, instead of talking about 
it; that he do not reach the eagerly expected 
conflagration too soon, nor delay it too long; 
and that he make more and more apparent the 
meaning of the characters in their relations to 
each other and to the plot. If the spectator be 
confused, baffled, irritated or bored, or any or 
all of these, he has a legitimate complaint 
against the dramatist. And be it noted that 
while the majority of a theater audience may 
not with self-conscious analysis know why they 
are dissatisfied, under these conditions, the dis- 
satisfaction is there, just the same, and thus do 
they become critics, though they know it not, 
even as M. Jourdain talked prose all his days 
without being aware of it. 



153 



CHAPTER IX 

CLIMAX 

T 7^7ITH the play properly introduced in 
^ ^ act one, and the development carried 
forward upon that firm foundation in the fol- 
lowing act or acts, the playwright approaches 
that part of his play which will, more than any- 
thing else, settle the fate of his work. As we 
have noted, if he have no such scene, he will 
not have a play at all. If on arrival it fail to 
seem indispensable and to be of dynamic qual- 
ity, the play will be broken-winged, at best. 
The proof that he is a genuine playwright by 
rightful calling and not a literary person, pro- 
ducing books for closet reading, lies just here. 
The moment has come when, with his compli- 
cation brought to the point where it must be 
solved, and all that has gone before waiting 
upon that solution, he must produce an effect 
with one skillful right-arm stroke which shall 

154 



CLIMAX 

make the spectators a unit in the feeling that 
the evening has been well spent and his drama 
is true to the best tradition of the stage. 

The stress has steadily increased to a degree 
at which it must be relieved. The strain is at 
the breaking point. The clash of characters 
or of circumstances operating upon characters 
is such that a crisis is at hand. By some in- 
genious interplay of word, action and scene, by 
an emotional crescendo crystallizing in a stage 
picture, by some unexpected reversion of inci- 
dent or of human psychology (known in stage 
technic as peripety) or by an unforeseen acci- 
dent in the fall of events, an electric change is 
exhibited, with the emotions of the dramatis 
personce at white heat and the consequent en- 
thraldom of the audience. Of all the varied 
pleasures of the playhouse, this moment, scene, 
turn of story, is that which appeals to the larg- 
est number and has made the theater most dis- 
tinctive. This is not to say that a profound 
revelation of character, or a pungent reflection 
on life, made concrete in a situation, may not 
be a finer thing to do. It is merely to recog- 

155 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

nize a certain unique thing the stage can do 
in story telling, as against other forms, and to 
confess its universal attraction. While there is 
much in latter day play-making that seems to 
deaden the thrill of the obligatory scene, a 
clear comprehension of its central importance 
is basal in appreciation of the drama. A play 
may succeed without it, and a temporary 
school of psychologues may even pretend to 
pooh-pooh it as an outworn mode of cheap the- 
atrics. The influence of Ibsen, and there is 
none more potent, has been cited as against the 
scene a faire, in the French sense ; and it is true 
that his curtains are less obviously stressed and 
appear to aim not so much at the palpably 
heightened eff*ects traditional of the develop- 
ment in French hands, — the most skillful hands 
in the world. But it remains true that this 
central and dominant scene is inherent in the 
very structure of dramatic writing. To repeat 
what was said before, the play that abandons 
climax may be good entertainment, but is by 
so much poorer drama. The best and most suc- 
cessful dramaturgy of our day therefore will 

156 



CLIMAX 

seek to preserve the obligatory scene, but hide 
under more subtle technic the ways and means 
by which it is secured. The ways of the past 
became so open in the attempt to reach the 
result as to produce in many cases a feeling 
of bald artifice. This the later technic will 
do all in its power to avoid, while clinging per- 
sistently to the principle of climax, a principle 
of life just as truly as a principle of art. Phy- 
sicians speak in a physiological sense of the 
grand climacteric of a man's age. 

A test of any play may be found in the readi- 
ness with which it lends itself to a simple three- 
fold statement of its story; the proposition, as 
it is called by technicians. This tabloid sum- 
mary of the essence of the play is valuable in 
that it reveals plainly two things : whether there 
is a play in hand, and what and where is its 
obligatory scene. All who wish to train them- 
selves to be critical rather than captious or 
silly in their estimate of drama, cannot be too 
strongly urged to practice this exercise of re- 
ducing a play to its lowest terms, its essential 
elements. It will serve to clarify much that 

157 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

might remain otherwise a muddle. And one 
of the sure tests of a good play may be found 
here; if it is not a workable drama, either it 
will not readily reduce to a proposition or else 
cannot be stated propositionally at aU. Fur- 
ther, a play that is a real play in substance, 
and not a hopelessly undramatic piece of writ- 
ing arbitrarily cut up into scenes or acts, and 
expressed in dialogue (like some of the dramas 
of the Bengalese Taghore), can be stated 
clearly and simply in a brief paragraph. This 
matter of reduction to a skeleton which is 
structurally a sine qua non may be illustrated. 
A proposition, to define it a little more care- 
fully, is a threefold statement of the essence of 
a play, so organically related that each succes- 
sive part depends upon and issues from the 
other. It contains a condition (or situation), 
an action, and a result. For instance, the prop- 
osition of Macbeth may be expressed as fol- 
lows : 

I. A man, ambitious to be king, abetted 
by his wife, gains the throne through 
murder. 

158 



CLIMAX 

II. Remorse visits them both. 
III. What will be the effect upon the 
pair? 

Reflection upon this schematic summary will 
show that the interest of Shakespeare's great 
drama is not primarily a story interest; plot 
is not the chief thing, but character. The essen- 
tial crux lies in the painful spectacle of the 
moral degeneration of husband and wife, sin 
working upon each according to their con- 
trasted natures. Both have too much of the 
nobler elements in them not to experience re- 
gret and the prick of conscience. This makes 
the drama called Macbeth a fine example of 
psychologic tragedy in the true sense. 

Or take a well-known modern play, Camille: 

I. A young man loves and lives with a 
member of the demi-monde. 
II. His father pleads with her to give him 
up, for his own sake. 
III. What will she do? 

It will be observed that the way the lady 
of the camellias answers the question is the 
revelation of her character; so that the play 

159 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

again, although its story interest is sufficient, is 
primarily a character study, surrounded by 
Dumas fils with a rich atmosphere of under- 
standing sympathy and with sentiment that 
to a later taste becomes sentimentality. 

The School for Scandal might be stated in 
this way: 

I. An old husband brings his gay but 
well-meaning wife to town. 
II. Her innocent love of fun involves her 
in scandal. 
III. Will the two be reconciled, and how? 

Ibsen's A DolVs House may be thus ex- 
pressed in a proposition : 

I. A young wife has been babified by 
her husband. 
II. Experiences open her eyes to the fact 
that she is not educated to be either 
wife or mother. 
III. She leaves her husband until he can 
see what a woman should be in the 
home : a human being, not a doll. 

These examples will serve to show what is 
meant by proposition and indicate more defi- 
nitely the central purpose of the dramatic au- 

160 



CLIMAX 

thor and the technical demand made upon him. 
Be assured that under whatever varied garb 
of attraction in incident, scene and character, 
this underlying stern architectural necessity 
abides, and a drama's inability to reduce itself 
thus to a formula is a confession that in the 
structural sense the building is lop-sided and 
insecure, or, worse, that there is no structure 
there at all: nothing, so to put it, but a front 
elevation, a mere architect's suggestion. 

As the spectator breathlessly enjoys the 
climax and watches to see that unknotting of 
the knot which gives the French word denoue- 
ment (unknotting) its meaning, he will notice 
that the intensity of the climactic effect is not 
derived alone from action and word; but that 
largely effective in the total result is the pic- 
ture made upon the stage, in front of the back- 
ground of setting which in itself has pictorial 
quality, by the grouped characters as the cur- 
tain falls. 

This effect, conventionally called a situation, 
is for the eye as well as for the ear and the 
brain, — better, the heart. It would be an un- 

161 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

fortunate limitation to our theater culture if 
we did not comprehend to the full how large 
a part of the effect of a good play is due to 
the ever-changing series of artistic stage pic- 
tures furnished by the dramatist in collabora- 
tion with the actors and the stage manager. 
This principle is important throughout a play, 
but gets its most vivid illustration in the cli- 
max; hence, I enlarge upon it at this point. 

Among the most novel, fruitful and interest- 
ing experiments now being made in the theater 
here and abroad may be mentioned the at- 
tempts to introduce more subtle and imagina- 
tive treatment of the possibilities of color and 
form in stage setting than have hitherto ob- 
tained. The reaction influenced by f amiharity 
with the unadorned simplicity of the Eliza- 
bethans, the Gordon Craig symbolism, the 
frank attempt to substitute artistic suggestion 
for the stupid and expensive reproduction on 
the stage of what is called "real life," are 
phases of this movement, in which Germany 
and Russia have been prominent. The stage 
manager and scene deviser are daily becom- 

162 



CLIMAX 

ing more important factors in the production 
of a play; and along with this goes a clearer 
perception of the values of grouping and re- 
grouping on the part of the plastic elements 
behind the footlights.* Many a scenic mo- 
ment, many a climax, may be materially dam- 
aged by a failure to place the characters in 
such relative positions as shall visualize the 
dramatic feeling of the scene and reveal in 
terms of picture the dramatist's meaning. 
After all, the time-honored convention that the 
main character, or characters, should, at the 
moment when they are dominant in the story, 
take the center of the stage, is no empty con- 
vention; it is based on logic and geometry. 
There is a direct correspondence between the 
unity of emotion concentrated in a group of 
persons and the eye effect which reports that 
fact. I have seen so fine a climax as that in 
Jones's The Hypocrites — one of the very best 

* Gordon Craig's book on The Art of The Thea- 
tre may be consulted for further light upon a move- 
ment that is very significant and likely to be far- 
reaching in time, in its influence upon future stage and 
dramatic conditions. 

163 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

in the modern repertory — well nigh ruined by 
a stock company, when, owing to the purely 
arbitrary demand that the leading man should 
have the center at a crucial moment, although 
in the logic of the action he did not belong 
there, the two young lovers who were dra- 
matically central in the scene were shunted 
off to the side, and the leading man, whose 
true position was in the deep background, de- 
delivered his curtain speech close up to the 
footlights on a spot mathematically exact in 
its historic significance. True dramatic rela- 
tions were sacrificed to relative salaries, and, as 
a result, a scene which naturally receives half 
a dozen curtain calls, went off with compara- 
tive tameness. It was a striking demonstration 
of the importance of picture on the stage as an 
externalization of dramatic facts. 

If the theater-goer will keep an eye upon 
this aspect of the drama, he will add much of 
interest to the content of his pleasure and do 
justice to a very important and easily over- 
looked phase of technic. It is common in 
criticism, often professional, to sneer at the 

164 



CLIMAX 

tendency of modern actors, under the stage 
manager's guidance, continually to shift po- 
sitions while the dialogue is under way; thus 
producing an unnecessarily uneasy effect of 
meaningless action. As a generalization, it 
may be said that this is done (though at times, 
no doubt, overdone) on a principle that is 
entirely sound : it expresses the desire for a new 
picture, a recognition of the law that, in drama, 
composition to the eye is as truly a principle 
as it is in painting. And with that considera- 
tion goes the additional fact that motion im- 
plies emotion; than which there is no surer 
law in psycho-physics. Abuse of the law, on 
the stage, is beyond question possible, and fre- 
quently met. But a redistribution of the posi- 
tions of actors on the boards, when not abused, 
means they have moved under the compulsion 
of some stress of feeling and then the move- 
ment is an external symbol of an internal state 
of mind. The drama must express the things 
within by things without, in this way; that 
is its method. The audience is only properly 
irritated when a stage moment which, from the 

165 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

nature of its psychology, calls for the static, is 
injured by an unrelated, fussy, bodily activity. 
Motion in such a case becomes as foolish as the 
scene shifting in one of the highest colored 
and most phantasmagoric of our dreams. The 
wise stage director will not call for a change of 
picture unless it represents a psychologic fact. 
Two men converse at a table ; one communi- 
cates to the other, quietly and in conversational 
tone, a fact of alarming nature. The other 
leaps to his feet with an exclamation and paces 
the floor as he talks about it; nothing is more 
fitting, because nothing is truer to life. The 
repressive style of acting to-day, which might 
try to express this situation purely by facial 
work, goes too far in abandoning the legitimate 
tools of the craft. Let me repeat that, despite 
all the refining upon older, more violent and 
crudely expressive methods of technic, the stage 
must, from its very nature, indicate the emo- 
tions of human beings by objective, concrete 
bodily reaction. The Greek word for drama 
means doing. To exhibit feeling is to do some- 
thing. 

166 



I 



CLIMAX 

Or let us take a more composite group : that 
which is seen in a drawing room, with various 
knots of people talking together just before 
dinner is announced. A shift in the groups, 
besides effecting the double purpose of pleas- 
ing the eye and allowing certain portions of 
the dialogue to come forward and get the ear 
of the audience, also incidentally tells the 
truth: these groups in reality would shift and 
change more or less by the law of social con- 
venience. The general greetings of such an 
occasion would call for it. In a word, then, 
the stage is, among other things, a plastic rep- 
resentation of life, forever making an appeal 
to the eye. The application of this to the 
climax shows how vastly important its pictorial 
side may be. 

The climax that is prolonged is always in 
danger. Lead up to it slowly and surely, se- 
cure the effect, and then get away from it in- 
stantly by lowering the curtain. Do not fum- 
ble with it, or succimab to the insinuating temp- 
tation of clinging to what is so effective. The 
dramatist here is like a fond father loath to say 

167 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

farewell to his favorite child. But say the 
parting word he must, if he would have his 
offspring prosper and not, like many a father 
ere this, keep the child with him to its detri- 
ment. A second too much, and the whole thing 
will be imperiled. At the denouement, every 
syllable must be weighed, nor found wanting; 
every extraneous word ruthlessly cut out, the 
feats of fine language so welcome in other 
forms of literary composition shunned as an 
arch enemy. Colloquialism, instead of literary 
speech, even bad grammar where more formal 
book-speech seems to dampen the fire, must be 
instinctively sought. And whenever the action 
itself, backed by the scenery, can convey what 
is aimed at, silence is best of all; for then, if 
ever, silence is indeed golden. All this the 
spectator will quietly note, sitting in his seat of 
judgment, ready to show his pleasure or dis- 
pleasure, according to what is done. 

A difficulty that blocks the path of every 
dramatist in proportion as its removal improves 
his piece, is that of graduating his earlier cur- 
tains so that the climax (third act or fourth, 

168 



CLIMAX 

as it may) is obviously the outstanding, over- 
powering effect of the whole play. The cur- 
tain of the first act will do well to possess at 
least some slight heightening of the interest 
maintained progressively from the opening of 
the drama; an added crispness perceptible to 
all who look and listen. And the crisis of the 
second act must be diff'erentiated from that 
of the first in that it has a tenser emotional 
value, while yet it is distinctly below that of 
the climax, if the obligatory scene is to come 
later. Sad indeed the result if any curtain ef- 
fect in appeal and power usurp the royal place 
of the climactic scene ! And this skillful grada- 
tion of eff*ects upon a rising scale of interest, 
while always aimed at, is by no means always 
secured. This may happen because the drama- 
tist, with much good material in his hands, has 
believed he could use it prodigally, and been 
led to overlook the principle of relative values 
in his art. A third act climax may secure a 
tremendous sensation by the device of keeping 
the earlier eff*ects leading up to it compara- 
tively low-keyed and quiet. The tempest may 

169 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

be, in the abstract, only one in a teapot; but a 
tempest in effect it is, all the same. 

Ibsen's plays often illustrate and justify this 
statement, as do the plays of the younger 
British school. Barker, Baker, McDonald, 
Houghton, Hankin. And the reverse is 
equally true : a really fine climax may be made 
pale and ineffective by too much of sensational 
material introduced earlier in the play. 

The climax of the drama is also the best 
place to illustrate the fact that the stage ap- 
peal is primarily emotional. If this central 
scene be not of emotional value, it is safe to 
say that the play is doomed ; or will at the most 
have a languishing life in special performances 
and be cherished by the elite. The stage story, 
we have seen, comes to the auditor warm and 
vibrant in terms of feeling. The idea which 
should be there, as we saw, must come by way 
of the heart, whence, as George Meredith de- 
clares, all great thoughts come. Herein lies 
another privilege and pitfall of the dramatist. 
Privilege, because teaching by emotion will al- 
ways be most popular ; yet a pitfall, because it 

170 



CLIMAX 

sets up a temptation to play upon the unthink- 
ing emotions which, once aroused, sweep con- 
viction along to a goal perhaps specious and 
undesirable. To say that the theater is a place 
for the exercise of the emotions, is not to say 
or mean that it is well for it to be a place 
for the display and influence of the unregu- 
lated emotions. Legitimate drama takes an 
idea of the brain, or an inspiration of the imag- 
inative faculties, and conveys it by the ruddy 
road of the feelings to the stirred heart of the 
audience; it should be, and is in its finest ex- 
amples, the happy union of the head and heart, 
so blended as best to conserve the purpose of 
entertainment and popular instruction; popu- 
lar, for the reason that it is emotional, con- 
crete, vital; and instructive, because it sinks 
deeper in and stays longer (being more keenly 
felt) than any mere exercise of the intellect in 
the world. 

The student, whether at home with the book 
of the play in hand or in his seat at the theater, 
will scrutinize the skilled effects of climax, 
seeking principles and understanding more 

171 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

clearly his pleasure therein. In reading 
Shakespeare, for example, he will see that the 
obligatory scene of The Merchant of Venice 
is the trial scene and the exact moment when 
the height is reached and the fall away from 
it begins, that where Portia tells the Jew to 
take his pound of flesh without the letting of 
blood. In modern drama, he will think of the 
scene in Sudemann's powerful drama, Magda, 
in which Magda's past is revealed to her fine 
old father as the climax of the action; and in 
Pinero's strongest piece. The Second Mrs. 
Tanqueray, will put his finger on the scene of 
the return of Paula's lover as the crucial thing 
to show. And so with the scene of the cross- 
examination of the woman in Jones's Mrs, 
Dane's Defense, and the scene in Lord Dar- 
lington's rooms in Wilde's Lady Windermere's 
Fan, and the final scene in Shaw's Candida, 
where the playwright throws forward the 
scene a faire to the end, and makes his heroine 
choose between husband and lover. These, and 
many like them, will furnish ample food for 
reflection and prove helpful in clarifying the 

172 



CLIMAX 

mind in the essentials of this most important 
of all the phenomena of play-building. 

It is with the climax, as with everything else 
in art or in life: honesty of purpose is at the 
bottom of the success that is admirable. Mere 
effectivism is to be avoided, because it is insin- 
cere. In its place must be effectiveness, which 
is at once sincere and dramatic. 

The climax, let it be now assumed, has been 
successfully brought off. The curtain falls 
on the familiar and pleasant buzz of conver- 
sation which is the sign infallible that the 
dramatist's dearest ambition has been attained. 
Could we but listen to the many detached bits 
of talk that fly about the house, or are heard 
in the lobby, we might hazard a shrewd guess 
at the success of the piece. If the talk be 
favorable, and the immediate reception of the 
obligatory scene has been hearty, it would ap- 
pear as if the playwright's troubles were over. 
But hardly so. Even with his climax a suc- 
cess, he is not quite out of the woods. A task, 
difficult and hedged in with the possibilities of 
mistake, awaits him; for the last act is just 

173 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

ahead, and it may diminish, even nuUify the 
favorable impression he has just won by his 
manipulation of the scene a faire. And so, 
girding himself for the last battle, he enters the 
arena, where many a good man before him 
has unexpectedly fallen before the enemy. 



I 



174 



CHAPTER X 

ENDING THE PLAY 

r |lO one who is watchful in his theater 
-*■ seat, it must have become evident that 
many plays, which in the main give pleasure 
and seem successful, have something wrong 
with the last act. The play-goer may feel this, 
although he never has analyzed the cause or 
more than dimly been aware of the artistic 
problem involved. An effect of anti-climax is 
produced by it, interest flags or utterly disap- 
pears; the final act seems to lag superfluous 
on the stage, like Johnson's player. 

Several reasons combine to make this no un- 
common experience. One may have emerged 
from the discussion of the climax. It is the 
hard fortune of the last act to follow the great 
scene and to suffer by contrast; even if the 
last part of the play be all that such an act 

175 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

should be, there is in the nature of the ease a 
likelihood that the auditor, reacting from his 
excitement, may find this concluding section 
of the drama stale, flat and unprofitable. To 
overcome this disadvantage, to make the last act 
palatable without giving it so much attraction 
as to detract from the scene a faire and throw 
the latter out of its due position in the center 
of interest, offers the playwright a very defi- 
nite labor and taxes his ingenuity to the ut- 
most. The proof of this is that so many 
dramas, up to the final act complete successes 
and excellent examples of sound technic, go to 
pieces here. I am of the opinion that in no 
one particular of construction do plays with 
matter in them and some right of existence 
come to grief more frequently than in this suc- 
cessful handling of the act which closes the 
drama. It may even be doubted if the inex- 
perienced dramatist has so much trouble with 
his climax as with this final problem. If he had 
no scene a faire he would hardly have written 
a play at all. But this tricky ultimate portion 
of the drama, seemingly so minor, may prove 

176 



ENDING THE PLAY 

that which will trip him in the full flush of his 
victory with the obligatory scene. 

At first blush, it would seem as if, with the 
big scene over, little remained to be done with 
the play, so far as story is concerned. In a 
sense this is true. The important elements are 
resolved; the main characters are defined for 
good or bad; the obstacles which have com- 
bined to make the plot tangle have been re- 
moved or proved insurmountable. The play 
has, with an increasing sense of struggle, 
grown to its height ; it must now fall from that 
height by a plausible and more gentle descent. 
If it be a tragedy, the fall spells catastrophe, 
and is more abrupt and eye-compelling. If 
comedy be the form, then the unknotting means 
a happy solution of all difficulties. But in 
either case, the chief business of this final part 
of the play would appear to be the rounding 
out of the fable, the smoothing off of corners, 
and the production of an artistic effect of finish 
and finality. If any part of the story be in- 
complete in plot, it will be in all probability 
that which has to do with the subplot, if there 

177 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

be one, or with the fates of subsidiary charac- 
ters. If the playwright, wishing to make his 
last act of interest, and in order to justify the 
retention of the audience in the theater for 
twenty minutes to half an hour more, should 
leave somewhat of the main story to be cleared 
up in the last act, he has probably weakened 
his obligatory scene and made a strategic mis- 
take. And so his instinct is generally right 
when he prefers to get all possible dramatic 
satisfaction into the scene a faire, even at the 
expense of what is to follow. 

A number of things this act can, however, 
accomplish. It can, with the chief stress and 
strain over, exhibit characters in whom the au- 
dience has come to have a warm interest in some 
further pleasant manifestation of their per- 
sonality, thus offering incidental entertainment. 
The interest in such stage persons must be very 
strong to make this a sufficient reason for pro- 
longing a play. Or, if the drama be tragic in 
its nature, some lighter turn of events, or some 
brighter display of psychology, may be pre- 
sented to mitigate pain and soften the awe and 

178 



ENDING THE PLAY 

terror inspired by the main theme; as, for in- 
stance, Shakespeare alleviates the deaths of the 
lovers in Romeo and Juliet by the reconcilia- 
tion of the estranged families over their fair 
young bodies. A better mood for leaving the 
playhouse is thus created, without any lying 
about life. The Greeks did this by the use 
of lyric song at the end of their tragedies; 
melodrama does it by an often violent wresting 
of events to smooth out the trouble, as well as 
by lessening our interest in character as such. 

Also, and here is, I believe, its prime func- 
tion, the last act can show the logical outflow 
of the situation already laid down and brought 
to its issue in the preceding acts of the drama. 
Another danger lurks in this for the tech- 
nician, as may be shown. It would almost 
seem that, in view of the largely supereroga- 
tory character of this final act, inasmuch as the 
play seems practically over with the scene a 
faire, it might be best honestly to end the piece 
with its most exciting, arresting scene and cut 
out the final half hour altogether. 

But there is an artistic reason for keeping 
179 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

it as a feature of good play-making to the end 
of the years ; I have just referred to it. I mean 
the instinctive desire on the part of the dra- 
matic artist and his cooperative auditors so to 
handle the cross-section of life which has been 
exhibited upon the stage as to make the transi- 
tion from stage scene to real life so gradual, 
so plausible, as to be pleasant to one's sense of 
esthetic vraisemhlance. To see how true this 
is, watch the effect upon yourself made by a 
play which rings down the last curtain upon a 
sensational moment, leaving you dazed and 
dumb as the lights go up and the orchestra ren- 
ders its final banality. Somehow, you feel that 
this sudden, violent change from life fictive and 
imaginative to the life actual of garish streets, 
clanging trolleys, tooting motor cars and 
theater suppers is jarring and wrong. Art, 
you whisper to yourself, should not be so com- 
pletely at variance with life; the good artist 
should find some other better way to dismiss 
you. The Greeks, as I said, sensitive to this de- 
mand, mitigated the terrible happenings of 
their colossal legendary tragedies by closing 

180 



ENDING THE PLAY 

with lofty lyric choruses. Turn to the last 
pages of Sophocles's CEdipus Tyrannus, per- 
haps the most drastic of them all, for an exam- 
ple. I should venture to go so far as to suggest 
it as possible that in an apparent exception like 
Othello, where the drama closes harshly upon 
the murder of the ewe lamb of a wife, Shake- 
speare might have introduced the alleviation of 
a final scene, had he ever prepared this play, or 
his plays in general, after the modern method 
of revision and final form, for the Argus-eyed 
scrutiny they were to receive in after-time. 
However, that his instinct in this matter, in 
general, led him to seek the artistic consolation 
which removes the spectator from too close and 
unrelieved proximity to the horrible is beyond 
cavil. If he do furnish a tragic scene, there 
goes with it a passage, a strain of music, an 
unforgettable phrase, which, beauty being its 
own excuse for being, is as balm to the soul 
harrowed up by the agony of a protagonist. 
Horatio, over the body of his dear friend, 
speaks words so lovely that they seem the one 
rubric for sorrow since. And, still further re- 

181 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

moving us from the solemn sadness of the mo- 
ment, enters Fortinbras, to take over the cares 
of kingdom and, in so doing, to remind us that 
beyond the individual fate of Hamlet lies the 
great outer world of which, after all, he is but 
a small part ; and that the ordered cosmos must 
go on, though the Ophelias and Hamlets of the 
world die. The mere horrible, with this allevia- 
tion of beauty, becomes a very different thing, 
the terrible; the terrible is the horrible, plus 
beauty, and the terrible lifts us to a lofty mood 
of searching seriousness that has its pleasure, 
where the horrible repels and dispirits. Thus, 
the sympathetic recipient gets a certain austere 
satisfaction, yes, why not call it pleasure, from 
noble tragedy. But he asks that the last act 
pour the oil of peace, of beauty and of philo- 
sophic vision upon the troubled waters of life. 

There is then an artistic justification, if I am 
right, for the act following the climax, quite 
aside from the conventional demand for it as 
a time filler, and its convenience too in the 
way of binding up loose ends. 

As the function of the great scene is to de- 

182 



ENDING THE PLAY 

velop and bring to a head the principal things 
of the play, so that of this final act would seem 
to be the taking care of the lesser things, to an 
effect of harmonious artistry. And whenever 
a playwright, confronting these difficulties and 
dangers, triumphs over them, whenever your 
comment is to the effect that, since it all ap- 
pears to be over, it is hard to see what a last 
act can offer to justify it, and yet if that act 
prove interesting, freshly invented, unexpect- 
edly worth while, you will, if you care to do 
your part in the Triple Alliance made up of 
actors, playwright and audience, express a sen- 
timent of gratitude, and admiration as well, for 
the theater artist who has manipulated his ma- 
terial to such good result. 

The last act of Thomas's The WitcMng 
Hour can be studied with much profit with this 
in mind. It is a masterly example of added 
interest when the things vital to the story have 
been taken care of. Another, and very dif- 
ferent, example is Louis Parker's charming 
play, Rosemary, where at the climax a middle- 
aged man parts from the young girl who loves 

188 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

him and whom he loves, because he does not 
realize she returns the feeling, and, moreover, 
she is engaged to another, and, from the con- 
ventions of age, the match is not desirable. The 
story is over, surely, and it is a sad ending; 
nothing can ever change that, unless the dram- 
atist tells some awful lies about life. Had he 
violently twisted the drama into a "pleasant 
ending" in the last act he would have given us 
an example of an outrageous disturbance of 
key and ruined his piece. What does he do, 
indeed, what can he do? By a bold stroke of 
the imagination, he projects the final scene fifty 
years forward, and shows the man of forty an 
old man of ninety. He learns, by the finding 
of the girl's diary, that she loved him; and, 
as the curtain descends, he thanks God for a 
beautiful memory. Time has plucked out the 
sting and left only the flower-like fragrance. 
This is a fine illustration of an addendum that 
is congruous. It lifts the play to a higher 
category. I believe it is true to say that this 
unusual last act was the work of Mr. Murray 
Carson, Mr. Parker's collaborator in the play. 

184 



ENDING THE PLAY 

One more example may be given, for these 
illustrations will bring out more clearly a phase 
of dramatic writing which has not received 
overmuch attention in criticism. The recent 
clever comedy, Years of Discretion, by the 
Hattons, conducts the story to a conventional 
end, when the middle-aged lovers, who have 
flirted, danced and motored themselves into 
an engagement and marriage, are on the eve 
of their wedding tour. If the story be a love 
story, and it is in essence, it ought to be over. 
The staid Boston widow has been metamor- 
phosed by gay New York, her maneuvers have 
resulted in the traditional end ; she has got her 
man. What else can be offered to hold the 
interest? 

And just here is where the authors have been 
able, passing beyond the conventional limits of 
story, to introduce, in a lightly touched, pleas- 
ing fashion, a bit of philosophy that underlies 
the drama and gives it an enjoyable fillip at 
the close. We see the newly wed pair, fac- 
ing that wedding tour at fifty, and secretly 
longing to give it up and settle down comf ort- 

185 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

ably at home. They have been playing young 
during the New York whirl, why not be nat- 
ural now and enjoy life in the decade to which 
they belong? So, in the charming garden scene 
they confess, and agree to grow old grace- 
fully together. It is excellent comedy and 
sound psychology; to some, the last act is the 
best of all. Yet, regarded from the act pre- 
ceding, it seemed superfluous. 

Still another trouble confronts the play- 
wright as he comes at grapples with the final 
act. He falls under the temptation to make a 
conventionally desirable conclusion, the "pleas- 
ant ending" already animadverted against, 
which is supposed to be the constant petition 
of the theater Philistine. Here, it will be ob- 
served, the pleasant ending becomes part of the 
constructive problem. Shall the playwright 
carry out the story in a way to make it har- 
monious with what has gone before, both psy- 
chologically and in the logic of events? Shall 
he make the conclusion congruous with the 
climax, a properly deduced result from the 
situation therein shown? If he do, his play 

186 



ENDING THE PLAY 

will be a work of art, tonal in a totality whose 
respective parts are keyed to this effect. Or 
shall he, adopting the tag line familiar to us 
in fairy tales, "and so they lived happily ever 
after," wrest and distort his material in order 
to give this supposed-to-be-prayed-for condi- 
ment that the grown-up babes in front are cry- 
ing for? Every dramatist meets this question 
face to face in his last act, unless his plan has 
been to throw his most dramatic moment at the 
play's very end. A large percentage of all 
dramas weaken or spoil the effect by this han- 
dling of the last part of the play. The ending 
either is ineffective because unbelievable; or 
unnecessary, because what it shows had better 
be left to the imagination. 

An attractive and deservedly successful 
drama by Mr. Zangwill, Merely Mary Ann, 
may be cited to illustrate the first mistake. Up 
to the last act its handling of the relation of the 
gentleman lodger and the quaint little slavey 
is pitched in the key of truth and has a Dick- 
ens-like sympathy in it which is the main ele- 
ment in its charm. But in the final scene, where 

187 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

Mary Ann has become a fashionable young 
woman, meets her whilom man friend, and a 
match results, the improbability is such (to say 
nothing about the impossibility) as to destroy 
the previous illusion of reality; the auditor, if 
intelligent, feels that he has paid too high a 
price for such a union. I am not arguing that 
the improbable may not be legitimate on the 
stage ; but only trying to point out that, in this 
particular case, the key of the play, established 
in previous acts, is the key of probability; and 
hence the change is a sin against artistic 
probity. The key of improbability^ as in some 
excellent farces. Baby Mine, Seven Days, 
Seven Keys to Baldpate, and their kind — 
where it is basal that we grant certain con- 
ditions or happenings not at all likely in life — 
is quite another matter and not of necessity rep- 
rehensible in the least. But Merely Mary Ann 
is too true in its homely fashion to fob us off 
with lies at the end; we believed it at first and 
so are shocked at its mendacity. 

One of the best melodramas of recent years 
is Mr. McLellan's Leah Kleschna. Its psy- 

188 



ENDING THE PLAY 

chology, founded on the assumption that a 
woman whose higher nature is appealed to, will 
respond to the appeal, is as sound as it is fine 
and encouraging. She is a criminal who is 
caught opening a safe by the French statesman 
whose house she has entered. His conversa- 
tion with her is so effective that she breaks with 
her fellow thieves and starts in on another and 
better life in a foreign country, where the 
statesman secures for her honest employment. 
It is in the last act that the playwright gets 
into trouble, and illustrates the second possi- 
bility just mentioned ; unnecessary information 
which can readily be filled in by the spectator, 
without the addition of a superfluous act to 
show it. The woman has broken with her gang, 
she is saved; arrangement has been made for 
her to go to Austria (if my memory locates 
the land), there to work out her change of 
heart. Really, there is nothing else to tell. 
The essential interest of the play lay in the 
reclaiming of Leah ; she is reclaimed ! Why not 
dismiss the audience ? But the author, perhaps 
led astray by the principle of showing things 

189 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

on the stage, even if the things shown lie 
beyond the limits of the story proper, exhibits 
the girl in her new quarters, aided and abetted 
by the scene painter who places behind her a 
very expensive background of Nature; and 
then caps his unnecessary work by bringing the 
statesman on a visit to see how his protegee 
is getting along. Meanwhile, the knowing 
spectator murmurs in his seat (let us hope) 
and kicks against the pricks of convention. 

These examples indicate some of the prob- 
lems centering in an act which for the very 
reason that it is, or seems, comparatively unim- 
portant, is all the more likely to trip up a 
dramatist who, buoyed up by his victory in a 
fine and effective scene of climactic force, 
comes to the final act in a state of reaction, and 
forgetful of the fact that pride goeth before 
a fall — the fall of the curtain! No wonder 
that, in order to dodge all such difficulties, play- 
wrights sometimes project their climax for- 
ward into the last act and so shorten what is 
left to do thereafter; or, going further, place 
it at the play's terminal point. But the artistic 

190 



fe,^-.^ 



ENDING THE PLAY 

objections to this have been explained. Some 
treatment of the falHng action after the cli- 
max, longer or shorter, is advisable; and the 
dramatist must sharpen his wits upon this tech- 
nical demand and make it part of the satisfac- 
tion of his art to meet it. 

The fundamental business of the last act of 
a play, let it be repeated, is to show the general 
results of a situation presented in the crucial 
scene, in so far as those results are pertinent 
to a satisfactory grasp of story and idea on the 
part of the auditor. These results must be in 
harmony with the beginning, growth and crisis 
of the story and must either be demanded in 
advance by the audience, or gladly received as 
pleasant and helpful, when presented. The 
citation of such plays as Rosemary and Years 
of Discretion raises the interesting question 
whether a peculiar function of the final act may 
not lie in not only rounding out the story as 
such, but in bringing home the underlying idea 
of the piece to the audience. Surely a rich op- 
portunity, as yet but little utilized, is here. Yet 
again danger lurks in the opportunity. The 

191 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

last act might take on the nature of a philo- 
sophic tag", a preachment not organically re- 
lated to the preceding parts. This, of course, 
would be a sad misuse of the chance to give 
the drama a wider application and finer bloom. 
But if the playwright have the skill and inven- 
tive power to merge the two elements of story 
and idea in a final act which adds stimulating 
material while it brings out clearly the under- 
lying theme, then he will have performed a 
kind of double function of the drama. In the 
new technic of to-day and to-morrow this may 
come to be, more and more, the accepted aim 
of the resourceful, thoughtful maker of plays. 
The intelligent auditor in the playhouse with 
this aspect of technic before him will be able 
to assist in his cooperation with worthy plays 
by noticing particularly if the closing treat- 
ment of the material in hand seem germane to 
the subject; if it avoid anti-climax and keep 
the key; and if it demonstrates skill in over- 
coming such obstacles as have been indicated. 
Such a play-goer will not slight the final act as 
of only technical importance, but will be alert- 

192 



ENDING THE PLAY 

ly on the watch to see if his friend the play- 
wright successfully grapples with the last of 
the successive problems which arise during the 
complex and very difficult business of telling a 
stage story with clearness, eiFectiveness and 
charm. 



193 



CHAPTER XI 

THE SOCIAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE PLAY 

T ^ 7E have now surveyed the chief elements 
^ ^ involved in the making of a play and 
suggested an intelligent attitude on the part 
of the play-goer toward them. Primarily the 
aim has been to broaden and sharpen the ap- 
preciation of a delightful experience; for the 
sake of personal culture. But, as was briefly 
suggested in the chapter on the play as a cul- 
tural possibility, there is another reason why 
the student and theater attendant should real- 
ize that the drama in its possibilities is a work 
of art, and the theater, the place where it is ex- 
hibited, can be a temple of art. This other rea- 
son looks to the social significance of the play- 
house as a great, democratic people's amuse- 
ment where stories can be heard and seen more 
effectively, as to influence, than anywhere else 
or under any other imaginable conditions. It is 

194 



1 



SIGNIFICANCE OF THE PLAY 

a place where the great lessons of life can be 
emotionally received and so sink deep into the 
consciousness and conscience of folk at large. 
And so the question of the theater becomes 
more than the question of private culture, im- 
portant as that is; being, indeed, a matter of 
social welfare. This fact is now coming to be 
recognized in the United States, as it has long 
been recognized abroad. We see more plainly 
than we did that when states like France and 
Germany or the cities of such countries grant 
subventions to their theaters and make theater 
directors high officials of the government they 
do so not only from the conviction that the 
theater stands for culture (a good thing for 
any country to possess) but that they feel it 
to have a direct and vital influence upon the 
life of the citizens in general, upon the civiliza- 
tion of the day. They assume that the play- 
house, along with the school, library, news- 
paper and church, is one of the five mighty 
social forces in suggesting ideas to a nation 
and creating ideals. 

The intelligent theater-goer to-day, as never 
195 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

before, will therefore note with interest the 
change in the notions concerning this popular 
amusement that is yet so much more, based 
upon much that has happened within our time ; 
the coming back of plays into literary signifi- 
cance and acceptance, so that leaders in letters 
everywhere are likely to be playwrights; the 
publication of contemporary drama, foreign 
and domestic, enabling the theater-goer to 
study the play he is to see or has seen; and the 
recognition of another aim in conducting this 
institution than a commercial one looking to 
private profit: the aim of maintaining a house 
of art, nourished by all concerned with the 
pride in and love of art which that implies, for 
the good of the people. The observer we have 
in mind and are trying to help a little will be 
interested in all such experiments as that of the 
Little Theaters in various cities, in the chil- 
dren's theaters in New York and Washington, 
in the fast-growing use of the pageant to il- 
luminate local history, in the attempts to estab- 
lish municipal stock companies, or competent 
repertory companies by enlightened private 

196 



SIGNIFICANCE OF THE PLAY 

munificence. And however successful or un- 
successful the particular ventures may be, he 
will see that their significance lies in their 
meaning a new, thoughtful regard for an in- 
stitution which properly conducted can con- 
serve the general social welfare. 

He will find in the growth within a very few 
years of an organization like the Drama 
League of America a sign of the times in its 
testimony to an interest, as wide as the coun- 
try, and wider, in the development and main- 
tenance of a sound and worthy drama. And 
he will be willing as lover of fellow-man as 
well as theater lover to do his share in the move- 
ment — it is no hyperbole to call it such — toward 
socializing the playhouse, so that it may gradu- 
ally become an enterprise conducted by the peo- 
ple and in the interests of the people, born of 
their life and cherished by their love. Nor will 
he be indifferent to the thought that, thus di- 
rected and enjoyed, it may in time come to be 
one of the proudest of national assets, as it 
has been before in more than one land and 
period. 

197 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

And with the general interests of the peo- 
ple in mind, our open-eyed observer will be es- 
pecially quick to approve any experiment to- 
ward bringing the stimulating life of the thea- 
ter to communities or sections of the city which 
hitherto have been deprived of amusement that 
while amusing ministers to the mind and emo- 
tions of the hearers in a way to give profit 
with the pleasure. Catholic in his view, he will 
just as warmly welcome a people's theater in 
South Boston or on the East Side in New 
York, or at Hull House in Chicago, as he will 
a New Theater in upper New York, or a Fine 
Arts Theater in Chicago, or a Toy Theater in 
Boston; believing that since the playhouse is 
in essence and by the nature of its appeal demo- 
cratic, it must neglect no class of society in its 
service. He will prick up his ears and become 
alert in hearing of the Minnesota experiment, 
where a rural play, written by a member of the 
agricultural school, was given under univer- 
sity auspices fifty times in one season, through- 
out the state. He will rejoice at the action of 
Dartmouth College in accepting a $100,000 

198 



SIGNIFICANCE OF THE PLAY 

bequest for the erection and conductment of 
a theater in the college community and serving 
the interests of both academic and town life. 
And he will also be glad to note that the Car- 
negie Institute of Technology, in Pittsburgh, 
has initiated a School of Drama as an organic 
part of the educational life. He will see in 
such things a recognition among educators that 
the theater should be related to educational life. 
And, musing happily upon such matters, it 
will come to him again and again that it is ra- 
tional to strive for a people's price for a peo- 
ple's entertainment, instead of a price for the 
best offerings prohibitive to four-fifths of all 
Americans. And in this fact he will see the 
explanation for the enormous growth of the 
moving picture type of amusement, realizing 
it to be inevitable under present conditions, be- 
cause a form of entertainment popular in price 
as well as in nature, and hence populously fre- 
quented. And so our theater-goer, who has 
now so long listened with at least hypothetic 
patience to exposition and argument, will be 
willing, indeed, will wish, as part of his watch- 

199 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

ful canniness with respect to the plays he sees 
and reads, to judge the playwright, among 
other things, according to his interpretation of 
life; and especially the modern social life of 
his own day and country. 

I have already spoken of the need to have 
an idea in drama ; a centralizing opinion about 
life or a personal reaction to it — something 
quite distinct from the thesis or propaganda 
which might change a work of art into a dis- 
sertation. Let it now be added that, other 
things being equal, a play to-day will repre- 
sent its time and be vital in proportion as it 
deals with life in terms of social interest. To 
put it another way, a drama to reflect our age 
must be aware of the intense and practically 
universal tendency to study society as an or- 
ganism, with the altruistic purpose of seeing 
justice prevail. The rich are attacked, the poor 
defended; combinations of business are as- 
sailed, and criminals treated as our sick 
brothers ; labor and capital contest on a gigan- 
tic scale, and woman looms up as a central and 
most agitating problem. All this and more, 

200 



SIGNIFICANCE OF THE PLAY 

arising from the same interest, offers a vast 
range of subject-matter to drama and a new 
spirit in treating it on the stage. Within the 
last half century the two great changes that 
have come in human life are the growth in the 
democratic ideal, with all that it suggests, and 
the revolutionary conception of what life is im- 
der the domination of scientific knowledge. 
All art forms, including this of the theater, 
have responded to these twin factors of influ- 
ence. In art it means sympathy in studying 
fellow-man and an attempt to tell the truth 
about him in all artistic depictions. Therefore, 
in the drama to-day likely to make the strong- 
est claim on the attention of the intelligent 
play-goers, we shall get the fullest recognition 
of this spirit and the frankest use of it as typi- 
cal of the twentieth century. This is what 
gives substance, meaning and bite to the plays 
of Shaw, Galsworthy, and Earker, of Hough- 
ton, and Francis and Sowerby, of Moody and 
Kennedy and Zangwill, at their best. To ac- 
knowledge this is not to deny that enjoyable 
farce, stirring melodrama and romantic ex- 

201 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

travaganza are not welcome; the sort of play 
which simply furnishes amusement in terms of 
good story telling, content to do this and no 
more. It is, however, to remind the reader that 
to be most representative of the day the 
drama must do something beyond this; must 
mirror the time and probe it too; yes, must, 
like a wise physician, feel the pulse of man 
to-day and diagnose his deepest needs and fail- 
ings and desires; in a word, must be a social 
drama, since that is the keynote of the present. 
It will be found that even in the lighter forms 
of drama which we accept as typical and satis- 
factory this social flavor may be detected, giv- 
ing it body, but not detracting from its pleas- 
urableness. Miss Crother's Young Wisdom 
has the light touch and the framework of farce, 
yet it deals with a definite aspect of feminism. 
Mr. Knoblauch's The Faun is a romantic fan- 
tasia, but is not without its keen social satire. 
Mr. Sheldon's The Havoc seems also farcical 
in its type; nevertheless it is a serious satiric 
thrust at certain extreme conceptions of mari- 
tal relations. And numerous dramas, melo- 

202 



SIGNIFICANCE OF THE PLAY 

dramatic in form and intention, dealing with 
the darker economic and sociological aspects 
of our life — the overworked crime play of the 
day — indefinitely swell the list. And so with 
many more plays, pleasant or unpleasant, 
which, while clinging close to the notion of 
good entertainment, do not refrain from social 
comment or criticism. The idea that criticism 
of life in a stage story must of necessity be 
heavy, dull and polemic is an irritating one, of 
which the Anglo-Saxon is strangely fond. The 
French, to mention one other nation, have con- 
stantly shown the world that to be intellectually 
keen and suggestive it is not necessary to be 
solemn or opaque; in fact, that one is sure to 
be all the more stimulating because of the light 
touch and the sense for social adaptability. 
This view will in time, no doubt, percolate 
through the somewhat obstinate layers of the 
Anglo-Saxon mind. 

From these considerations it may follow 
that our theater-goer, while generally receptive 
and broad-minded in his seat to the particular 
type of drama the playwright shall offer, will 

203 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

incline to prefer those plays which on the whole 
seem in some one of various possible ways to 
express the time; which drama that has sur- 
vived has always done. He will care most for 
the home-made play as against the foreign, if 
equally well made, since its problem is more 
likely to be his own, or one he can better under- 
stand. But he will not turn a cold shoulder to 
some European drama by a D'Annunzio, a 
Sudermann, a Maeterlinck or a Tolstoy, if it 
be a great work of art and deal with life in 
such universal applications and relations as to 
make it quite independent of national borders. 
One of the socializing and civilizing functions 
of the theater is thus to draw the peoples to- 
gether into a common bond of interest, a unit 
in that vast community which signifies the all- 
embracing experience of being a human crea- 
ture. Yet the theater-goer will have but a 
Laodicean regard for plays which present di- 
vergent national or technically local conditions 
of life practically incomprehensible to Ameri- 
cans at large ; some of the Gallic discussions of 
the French menage, for instance, Terence 

204j 



SIGNIFICANCE OF THE PLAY 

taught us wisely that nothing human should be 
alien from our interest ; true enough. There is 
however no good reason why interest should 
not grow as the matter in hand comes closer to 
us in time and space. And still more vigor- 
ously will he protest against any and all of the 
wretched attempts to change foreign material 
for domestic use to be noted when the Ameri- 
can producer (or traducer) feels he must re- 
move from such a play the atmospheric color 
which is of its very life, transferring a rural 
setting of old England to a similar setting in 
New England. Short of the drama of open 
evil teaching, nothing is worse than these ab- 
surd and abortive makings over of drama from 
abroad. The result is neither fish, flesh nor 
good red herring. They destroy every object 
of theater enjoyment and culture, lying about 
life and losing whatever grip upon credence 
they may have originally possessed. Happily, 
their day is on the wane. Even theater-goers 
of the careless kind have little or no use for 
them. 

That the stage of our day, a stage upon 

205 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

which it has been possible to attain success with 
such dramas as The Blue Bird, The Servant in 
the House, The Poor Little Rich Girl, The 
Witching Hour, Cyrano de Bergerac, Can- 
dida, What Every Woman Knows, The Great 
Divide and The Easiest Way (the enumeration 
is made to imply the greatest diversity of type) 
is one of catholic receptivity and some dis- 
criminating" patronage, should appear to any- 
one who has taken the trouble to follow the 
discussion up to this point, and whose theater 
experience has been fairly large. There is 
no longer any reason why our drama-going 
should not be one of the factors which min- 
ister to rational pleasure, quicken the sense of 
art and invite us fruitfully to participate in 
that free and desirable exchange of ideas which 
Matthew Arnold declared to be the true aim 
of civilization. Let us grant readily that the 
stage story which shows within theater restric- 
tions the life of a land and the outlying life of 
the world of men has its definite demarcations ; 
that it may not to advantage perform certain 
services more natural, for example to the 

206 



SIGNIFICANCE OF THE PLAY 

church, or the school. It must appeal upon 
the basis of the bosom interests and passions 
of mankind and its common denominator is 
that of the general emotions. Concede that it 
should not debate a philosophical question with 
the aim of the thinker, nor a legal question as 
if the main purpose were to settle a matter of 
law; nor a religious question with the purpose- 
ful finality of the theologian, or the didactic 
eloquence of the pulpit. But it can and should 
deal with any question pertinent to men, vital 
to the broad interests of human beings, in the 
spirit of the humanities and with the restraints 
of its particular art. It should be suggestive, 
arousing, not demonstrative or dogmatic. Its 
great outstanding advantage lies in its emo- 
tional suggestibility. To perform this service, 
and it is a mighty one, is to have an intelligent 
theater, a self-respecting theater, a theater that 
shall purvey rational amusement to the few and 
the many. And whenever theater-goers, by 
majority vote, elect it, it will arrive. 

It was suggested on an earlier page and 
may now be still more evident that intelligent 

207 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

theater-going begins long before one goes to 
the theater. It depends upon preparation of 
various kinds; upon a sense of the theater as 
a social institution, and of the renewed literary 
quality of the drama to-day ; upon a knowledge 
of the specific problems of the player and play- 
wright, and of the aids to this knowledge fur- 
nished by the best dramatic criticism; upon 
familiarity too with the printed drama, past 
and present, in a fast multiplying library that 
deals with the stage and dramatic writing. 
The last statement may be amplified here. 

A few years ago, there was hardly a serious 
publication either in England or America de- 
voted to the leigitimate interests of the stage 
from the point of view of the patron of the 
theater, the critic-in-the-seat whom we have so 
steadily had in mind. Such periodicals as ex- 
isted were produced rather in the interests of 
the stage people, actors, producers, and the 
like. This has now changed very much for the 
better. Confining the survey to this country, 
the monthly called The Theater has some value 
in making the reader aware of current activ- 

208 



SIGNIFICANCE OF THE PLAY 

ities. The two monthlies, The American Play- 
Wright and The Dramatist, edited respectively 
by William T. Price and Luther B. Anthony, 
are given to the technical consideration of con- 
temporary drama in the light of permanent 
principles, and are very useful. The quarterly, 
The Drama, edited and published under the 
auspices of The Drama League of America, is 
a dignified and earnest attempt to represent the 
cultural work of all that has to do with the 
stage; and a feature of it is the regular ap- 
pearance of a complete play not hitherto in 
print. Another quarterly. Poet Lore, al- 
though not given over exclusively to matters 
dramatic, has been honorably conspicuous for 
many years for its able critical treatment of the 
theater and play ; and especially for its transla- 
tions of foreign dramas, much of the best ma- 
terial from abroad being first given English 
form in its columns. At Madison, Wisconsin, 
The Play Booh is a monthly also edited by 
theater specialists and often containing il- 
luminating articles and reviews. And, of 
course, in the better class periodicals, monthly 

209 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

and weekly, papers in this field are appearing 
nowadays with increasing frequency, a testi- 
monial to the general growth of interest. Crit- 
ics of the drama like W. P. Eaton, Claj^ton 
Hamilton, Arthur Ruhl, Norman Hapgood, 
William Winter, Montrose J. Moses, Chan- 
ning Pollock, James O'Donnell Bennett, 
James S. Metcalf, and James Huneker are to 
be read in the daily press, in periodicals, or in 
collected book form. Advanced movements 
abroad are chronicled in The Mash, the publi- 
cation founded by Gordon Craig; and in 
Poetry and Drama, It is reasonable to believe 
that, with the renewed appreciation of the thea- 
ter, the work of the dramatic critic as such will 
be felt to be more and more important and his 
function will assume its significance in the eyes 
of the communit3^ A vigorous dramatic pe- 
riod implies worthy criticism to self -reveal it 
and to establish and maintain right standards. 
Signs are not wanting that we shall gradually 
train and make necessary in the United States 
a class of critic represented in England by 
William Archer and A. B. Walkley. Among 

210 



SIGNIFICANCE OF THE PLAY 

the publishers who have led in the movement 
to place good drama in permanent form in the 
hands of readers the firms of Maemillan, 
Scribner, Mitchell Kennerley, Henry Holt, 
John W. Luce, Harper and Brothers, B. W. 
Huebsch and Doubleday, Page & Company 
have been and are honorably to the fore. In 
the way of critical books which study the many 
aspects of the subject, they are now being 
printed so constantly as plainly to testify to 
the new attitude and interest. The student of 
technic can with profit turn to the manuals of 
William Archer, Brander Matthews, and Wil- 
liam T. Price; the studies of Clayton Hamil- 
ton, W. P. Eaton, Norman Hapgood, Barrett 
Clark, and others. For the civic idea applied 
to the theater, and the development of the 
pageant, he will read Percy Mackaye. And 
when it comes to plays themselves, as we have 
seen, hardly a week goes by without the appear- 
ance of some important foreign masterpiece in 
English, or some important drama of English 
speech, often in advance of or coincident with 
stage production. The best work of the day is 

211 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

now readily accessible, where, only a little while 
ago, book publication of drama (save the 
standard things of the past) was next to un- 
known. It is worth knowing that The Drama 
League of America is publishing, with the co- 
operation of Doubleday, Page & Company, an 
attractive series of Drama League Plays, in 
which good drama of the day, native and for- 
eign, is offered the public at a cost which cuts 
in two the previous expense. And the Drama 
League's selective List of essays and books 
about the theatre, with which is incorporated 
a complete list of plays printed in English, 
can be procured for a nominal sum and will 
give the seeker after light a thorough survey 
of what is here touched upon in but a few 
salient particulars. 

In short, there is no longer much excuse for 
pleading ignorance on the ground of inade- 
quate aid, if the desire be to inform oneself 
upon the drama and matters pertaining to the 
theater. 

The fact that our contemporary body of 
drama is making the literary appeal by ap- 

212 



SIGNIFICANCE OF THE PLAY 

pearing in book form is of special bearing 
upon the culture of the theater-goer. Mr. 
H. A. Jones, the English playwright, has re- 
cently declared that he deemed this the factor 
above all others which should breed an en- 
lightened attitude toward the playhouse. In 
truth, we can hardly have a self-respecting 
theater without the publication of the drama 
therein to be seen. Printed plays mean a 
claim to literary pretensions. Plays become 
literature only when they are preserved in 
print. And, equally important, when the spec- 
tator may read the play before seeing it, or, 
better yet, having enjoyed the play in the play- 
house, can study it in a book with this advan- 
tage, a process of revaluation and enforcement 
of effect, he will appreciate a drama in all its 
possibilities as in no other way. Detached 
from mob influence, with no confusion of play 
with players, he can attain that quieter, more 
comprehensive judgment which, coupled with 
the instinctive decision in the theater, com- 
bines to make a critic of him in the full sense. 
For these reasons, the well wisher of the 

213 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

theater welcomes as most helpful and encour- 
aging the now established habit of the prompt 
printing of current plays. It is no longer a re- 
proach from the view of literature to have your 
play acted ; it may even be that soon it will be 
a reproach not to have the printed play pre- 
sented on the boards. The young American 
man of letters, like his fellow in France, may 
feel that a literary debut is not truly made 
until his drama has been seen and heard, as 
well as read. While scholars are raking over 
the past with a fine-tooth comb, and publish- 
ing special editions of second and third-rate 
dramatists of earlier times, it is a good thing 
that modern plays, whose only demerit may be 
their contemporaneity, are receiving like 
honor, and that the dramas of Pinero, Jones, 
Wilde, Shaw, Galsworthy, Synge, Yeats, 
Lady Gregory, Zangwill, Dusany, Houghton, 
Hankin, Hamilton, Sowerby, Gibson, acted 
British playwrights ; and of Gillette, Thomas, 
Moody, Mackaye, Peabody, Walter, Sheldon, 
Tarkington, Davis, Patterson, Middleton, and 
Kennedy, acted American playwrights (two 

214 



SIGNIFICANCE OF THE PLAY 

dozen to stand for two score and more) can 
be had in print for the asking. It is good 
testimony that we are really coming to have a 
living theater and not a mere academic kow- 
towing to bygone altars whose sacrificial smoke 
has dimmed our eyes sometimes to the clear 
daylight of the Present. Preparation for the 
use of the theater looks before and after. At 
home and at school the training can be under 
way ; much happy preliminary reading and re- 
flection introduce it. By making oneself 
aware of the best that has been thought and 
said on the subject; by becoming conversant 
with the history, theory and practice of the 
playhouse, consciously including this as part of 
education; and, for good citizenship's sake, by 
regarding sound theater entertainment as a 
need and therefore a right of the people; in a 
word, by taking one's play-going with good 
sense, trained taste and right feeling, a per- 
son finds himself becoming a broader and bet- 
ter human being. He will be quicker in his 
sympathies, more comprehensive in his out- 
look, and will react more satisfactorily to life 

215 



HOW TO SEE A PLAY 

in general. All this may happen, although in 
turning to the theater his primary purpose may 
be to seek amusement. 

Is it a counsel of perfection to ask for 
this? Hardly, when so much has already oc- 
curred pointing out the better way. The civ- 
ilized theater has begun to come ; the prepotent 
influence of the audience is recognized. Surely 
the gain made, and the imperfections that still 
exist, are stimulants to that further bettering 
of conditions whose familiar name is Progress. 

In all considerations of the theater, it would 
be a good thing to allow the unfortunate word 
"elevate" to drop from the vocabulary. It mis- 
leads and antagonizes. It is better to say that 
the view Dresented in this book is one that 
wishes to make the playhouse innocently pleas- 
ant, rational, and sound as art. If by * 'elevate" 
we mean these things, well and good. But 
there is no reason why to elevate the stage 
should be to depress the box office — except a 
lack of understanding between the two. Unit- 
ing in the correct view, the two should rise 
and fall together. In fact, touching audience, 

216 



SIGNIFICANCE OF THE PLAY 

actors, playwrights, producers, and the society 
that is behind them all, intelligent cooperation 
is the open sesame. With that for a banner 
cry, mountains may be moved. 



217 



T 



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Macmillan books on kindred subjects. 



I 



Aspects of Modern Drama 

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better magazines, Miss Monroe has endeared herself to a large audi- 
ence of discriminating people. A distinguishing feature of the collec- 
tion is that it is notably representative of current ideas and sentiments, 
and pleasingly varied in theme. The author's subjects are chosen from 
the Panama Canal, the Titantic disaster, the turbine, the telephone, 
State Street, Chicago, and other modern phases or factors of life. 
There is also a group of love poems. 

Borderlands and Thoroughfares 

By WILFRID WILSON GIBSON 

Author of " Daily Bread," " Fires," " Womankind," etc. 

Clothy I2m0y $i.2S net 

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man in whom were combined a sympathy and appreciation of human- 
kind with a rare lyrical genius. This present book continues the work 
which Mr. Gibson can do so well. In it are brought together three 
plays and a number of short lyrics which reveal again his very decided 
talent. It is a collection which should indeed gratify those students of 
modern verse who are looking to such men as Gibson and Masefield 
for permanent and representative contributions to literature. 



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RABINDRANATH TAGORE*S NEW DRAMA 



The King of the Dark Chamber 

By 

RABINDRANATH TAGORE 

Nobel Prizeman in Literature, 1913; Author of "Gitan- 
gali," "The Gardener," "The Crescent Moon," 
" Sadhana," " Chitra," "The Post-Office," etc. Cloth 

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the reader, who began in idle curiosity, finds his intelHgence 

more and more engaged until, when he turns the last page, 

he has the feeling of one who has been moving in worlds 

not realized, and communing with great if mysterious 

presences." 

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AND Drawings by Jack B. Yeats, John 

CURBIE AND OTHERS. 

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account of his later life in Paris and the French influence shows 
the development of Synge in a new light. The chapter on the 
Irish dramatic movement before Synge depicts the literary and 
sociological evolution of the Irish Theatre and prepares the way 
to a full and proper understanding of Synge's own dramatic 
standpoint and his relation with the Abbey Theatre. In dealing 
with Synge's dramas, Mr. Bourgeois presents a clear and com- 
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duction — that reveals Synge's method of work and his artistic 
standards. 

"This book must, as a matter of course, displace everything 
else in existence as a collection of biographical details and of 
various people's personal impressions of Synge. A reader who 
has felt a lively curiosity about Synge and who has read every- 
thing else that has been published about him, will read page after 
page of personal details here in which almost every detail is 
new to him. . . It is the most remarkably exhaustive thing that 
has been written as far as we know about any modem writer 
within a few years of his death. " — Manchester Guardian, 



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